Niagara Falls Review -- Thorold mill proud of recycled content
October 6th, 2008AbitibiBowater churns out 400,000 metric tonnes of newspaper at its Thorold mill every year.
The company markets it as 100 per cent recycled paper -and now they've got independent proof.
The Forest Stewardship Council has begun stamping its seal of approval on the Thorold-made paper. That makes the mill the largest paper recycler in North America to be certified by the independent council, which promotes responsible forest management.
"This shows we're keeping old newspapers and magazines out of landfills, that they're not going into a hole in the ground," said mill manager Rob Martin. "That's an important statement for us."
The FSC seal is proof of recycling, said council president Antony Marcil.
Independent auditors track the source of incoming material to ensure it's "post-consumer" paper - as in old newspapers and magazines.
Some papermakers mix virgin timber wood scraps with recycled paper, he said, or unsaleable leftovers from the papermaking process.
"We don't consider that truly 100 per cent recycled paper," said Marcil.
An FSC seal of approval is valuable to paper customers and environmentalists alike.
"It's something of of a gold standard for forestry among many environmental groups," said Gillian McEachern, a Toronto-based boreal forest campaigner for Forest Ethics.
"This is a good step for your mill. The challenge is for the company as a whole to adopt FSC certification."
Most AbitibiBowater mills still pulp wood, not recycled paper. An FSC seal for those mills requires specific forestry practices set out by the council.
AbitibiBowater recently announced it will pursue FSC certification for forests covering 3.2 million hectares in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.
But that represents less than 20 per cent of the company's logging areas in Canada and the U. S., according to McEachern.
If the company is serious about sustainable forestry, it needs to certify all logging in Ontario and Quebec, said McEachern, and protect critical habitat for endangered species such as caribou.
Some groups, such as Greenpeace, have even labelled the partial certification as a way to "greenwash" AbitibiBowater paper products.
Marcil disagrees.
"From our perspective, it's a beginning," he said. "Our expectation would be the company will note the benefits and work its way up to full certification eventually."
McEachern has the same hope. "Hopefully, this will provide greater competitiveness for the mill, feeding into a market with increasingly higher demand for (green) products," she said.
AbitibiBowater could use a competitive boost. A market glut and the high cost of waste paper will force the Thorold mill to shut down for November -its longest closing yet.
The mill is pursuing eco-friendly ways to become more efficient, Martin said.
The plant already uses landfill gas from Walker Industries in its boilers.
A new $500-million natural gas-fired power plant is also under construction on site. The plant will provide up to 350,000 pounds per hour of steam to power the mill's newsprint recycling and feed electricity into the grid.
The local plant has also battled environmental controversy.
When the mill piled 36,000 tonnes of recycled paper waste on a Pelham property in 2005, outraged residents protested for two years.
AbitibiBowater eventually took back the waste and is now studying whether the material can be incinerated in an energy-from-waste project.
