The team at our Cedar Springs, Georgia, mill believes not only in being a good neighbor, but also a responsible environmental steward. In fact, the Wildlife Habitat Council recently certified the mill as a Wildlife at Work property, a distinction designed to recognize outstanding habitat management on industrial lands.
Wildlife at Work certifications aren’t easy to come by, but for Cedar Springs, the recognition is well-deserved. The employees working at the nearly 5,000-acre site go out of their way to minimize disruptions to wildlife living in the area. For example, the team has carefully relocated a dozen gopher tortoises over the years to ensure the animals are not harmed when a mill expansion or construction project occurs. Other species the team is working to increase include bluebirds, purple martins, bats, and insect pollinators, and it protects endangered mussels living in the Sawhatchee Creek, which runs through the property. The team is also planning to replant longleaf pine trees on 300 acres of the site, a move which will benefit a multitude of indigenous creatures, including the gopher tortoise.
Cedar Springs joins five other Georgia-Pacific facilities that have earned certification from the Wildlife Habitat Council over the years, including: Green Bay, Wisconsin; Big Island, Virginia; Monticello, Mississippi; New Augusta, Mississippi; and Rincon, Georgia.
Did you know that a set of stickers attached to a magazine can cause trouble in the recycling process of the paper? UPM businesses joined forces in developing a new adhesive that allows paper labels to become high-quality paper again after being recycled. Sticker attachments have recently seen a rise in popularity. However, the glues used in stickers have caused problems in the paper recycling process. The problem is not a new one but has become more notable as the quantity of sticker material attached to printed products has increased. Enhancing recyclability was a key target when UPM Raflatac, UPM Communication Papers and UPM’s Central European Research Centre joined forces. Click Read More below for additional detail.
The TFT and Ata Marie study was useful in verifying the foundational data of our existing supply chain and helping to identify some of the challenges and opportunities facing the business in the years ahead. We agree with the Rainforest Alliance that the future fibre supply of a business cannot be entirely predicted on the basis of one report, and that the work to ensure that our plantations are efficient and productive, as documented in our FCP Implementation Plan 2015 and Beyond, must be an ongoing priority.
Russia, Indonesia, California and Australia– the list of forest fires of unprecedented size and force is growing. Why is this occurring and how should the world respond to combat this threat? Australia has been burning like never before. The forest fire season typically peaks in January and February, but the fires that started in November last year have already killed over thirty people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in the states of Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. While record-breaking temperatures and a long-running drought had authorities monitoring the situation closely, nothing of this magnitude was expected. The most urgent phase of this round of fires is over, for now, but the blazes will take months to extinguish entirely. The full damage to Australian infrastructure and forest ecosystems is still to be revealed. As a new decade starts, we are entering uncharted territory. In the last five years, fires have destroyed thousands of hectares of forests in the United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden and China. click read more below for the rest of this story