According to the February 2018 Printing-Writing Monthly report, total printing-writing paper shipments decreased five percent in February compared to February 2017. U.S. purchases of printing-writing papers decreased four percent in February. Total printing-writing paper inventory levels decreased two percent from January 2017. Imports of printing-writing papers began 2018 four percent lower than January 2017 imports, while exports began the year 12 percent less than January 2017.

Fastmarkets reports that Kruger has temporarily stopped operations at its Corner Brook pulp and paper mill in Newfoundland and Labrador, eastern Canada, due to wildfire emergency measures introduced by provincial authorities in areas facing very high and extreme fire risk. The company suspended its Corner Brook forest operations on Saturday August 9 and stopped pulp and paper mill operations on August 15 owing to limited . Kruger expects the mill to be closed until the end of August or beginning of September. The mill is a newsprint producer with 230,000 tonnes per year of capacity that primarily serves customers in Europe and Asia.

The research, called Carbon Sinks+, aims to understand how commercial forests affect to climate change in ways other than as carbon sinks and stores. For example, forests also have an impact on the formation of aerosol particles and clouds, rainfall and the reflection of sunlight back into space, all of which affect to climate change. “It is not yet known which forest or ecosystem has the greatest overall cooling effect on the atmosphere and by which mechanisms. It is known that forests act as carbon sinks, but the SMEAR (station for measuring Earth surface-atmosphere relations) study aims to find out what else commercial forests do for the climate”, explains Markku Kulmala, Professor of Aerosol and Environmental Physics at the University of Helsinki, who is leading the study. The study will measure more than a thousand different variables, and the main measurement site will be the Hyytiälä forest station at the University of Helsinki, where measurements have been taken for decades.