Foreword: Our forests, our future
At Södra, sustainability permeates everything we do. Everyone is interested in sustainability throughout our value chain, from our customers and suppliers through to the end consumer. It’s one of the reasons we launched a series of sustainability seminars this month. Open to all, we hope they will offer a deeper understanding of what sustainability means to us, and to hear what it means to you. We’ll be adapting future content to customers’ needs, so we welcome feedback.
It’s also why Södra Cell’s Marketing Manager will be speaking at Tissue World about our latest marketing campaign, taking the message to consumers in central London that Swedish family forestry has a great story to tell. We hope you can use our story to help tell yours.
Our goals are clear. We are all working hard to find more sustainable solutions for the future from the precious resource that is our members’ forests. Many of them have inherited their forests and are sixth or seventh-generation owners, some more. By carefully nurturing and growing their forests, they encourage and preserve biodiversity, adapt their planting to resist climate change, and provide us with the raw materials we need to make a range of fossil-free products from pulp to building materials and biochemicals to biofuels.
Growing trees in Sweden is a 70-year process from planting to harvesting and requires long-term thinking and respect. The forest is renewable and sustainable, and our members invest in a richer biodiversity by setting aside forests for nature conservation and with active biodiversity management.
We respect the forest because we depend on it, and it is not infinite, which is why we make sure that we make the most of every tree we harvest. Nothing is wasted. Every family farm estate is different, an average member estate will only harvest about two hectares at a time, but resource efficiency and circularity are key for all.
Södra supports this patchwork of small family forests with a range of forestry services and processes to turn their wood into sustainable materials that help improve our daily lives, from toilet paper to skirting boards. We offer our members incentives to become certified to established forest management systems such as FSC and PEFC and we offer added incentives to set aside more conservation area than these stringent systems require. Many of our members do this voluntarily, because they understand that a healthy, growing forest is essential for the future – theirs, ours, yours.
Jessica Nordin, Sustainability Director
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Subjects: Pulp