PEFC Switzerland revised the country’s national forest certification system following the entry into force of the revised 2018 PEFC Sustainable Forest Management standard. In order to provide you with additional information about this revised national system, we are holding a webinar on 8 February, at 10:00 CET. The webinar is free to attend, and everyone is welcome. Register for the webinar at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItf-yvrToiG9ajX1uyrbU0GSLyC4cUuJWn

Paper Excellence Canada announced a $100,000 gift to the Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF) to boost efforts to conserve and restore Pacific salmon populations across B.C. The gift will be distributed through grants in communities where Paper Excellence operates to help advance community-driven stewardship initiatives at a local level. Approximately half of Pacific salmon populations are in some state of decline. Salmon encounter various challenges during their complex life cycle, including the effects of climate change, habitat loss, development, and more. Paper Excellence’s donation will support PSF’s Community Salmon Program, which awards hundreds of grants to grassroots salmon conservation projects across B.C. and the Yukon each year. Since PSF launched the Community Salmon Program in 1989, the program has engaged more than 300,000 volunteers to pursue local projects to restore salmon and rehabilitate their habitats.

With pandemic lockdowns as a backdrop, banks, utilities, telecoms and other large service providers boosted their efforts to switch customers from paper to electronic communication over the last 15 months, and with those efforts came a new wave of misleading environmental claims about paper – greenwashing. The Two Sides Anti-Greenwashing Campaign mobilized to push back against this tide of new claims in January after a 10-month pandemic-related interruption, and wins have been steadily increasing. Thanks to this renewed effort, 14 companies have changed or removed misleading environmental claims related to print and paper so far this year, including large banks, utilities and notably, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, whose communications reach 44 million Americans or 15% of the U.S. population. This is in addition to seven wins in 2020 on greenwashing cases that were already in progress.