The tiger cannot change his stripes any more than the leopard his spots, but a company in the firing line for destroying the tigers’ home can change and is doing so.
Asia Pulp and Paper has long been the bête noire of conservationist groups who have pointed to indiscriminate clearance of Indonesian rain forest and peat bogs to plant acacia and eucalyptus plantations for pulp as evidence that APP was environmental enemy number one. Campaigns against the company’s products resulted in blacklisting from key brands who have a wide selection of alternative suppliers to select from.
Then the company incurred the wrath of the EU for dumping Chinese-made, wood free, gloss coated papers, putting European suppliers at a disadvantage and European jobs at risk.
This is the company that Lee Henderson wanted to join. He did so three years ago, leaving a job with the Antalis head office in France where he had specialised in sustainability issues and managing the accreditations that the paper merchant needed, explaining the appeal of the new job.
“The socialisation of APP was the greatest challenge in the industry,” he says simply. At this point the company had already decided that it preferred not to remain a pariah, and had started to make overtures to the world that it would no longer tear up virgin forest for plantations. It had made similar pledges before, but observers found that words and deeds were not always aligned. Consequently, the NGOs were not convinced when as part of a 2020 statement the company committed to end clearances by 2018. The pledge was welcomed cautiously by FoE and Greenpeace, but was just part of the answer.
This time, however, two things had changed. Firstly it had engaged The Forest Trust, an NGO with experience in understanding what needs to change on the ground for the company to be accepted by western corporates and consumers and secondly, the EU Timber Regulation was being introduced. If APP did not change, its products risked being blocked from Europe and under similar legislation, from the US and Australia.
Henderson was involved in the work leading up to the introduction of the EUTR. “We were involved in helping create the due diligence systems because of our knowledge of the south East Asian markets. EUTR has definitely helped us. It checks the point of origin of all paper, providing transparency on the tree species used.” The details of how to discover the DNA of fibre used in paper do not belong in a print magazine, suffice to say Henderson understands the procedures involved in pinpointing which of the 70 or so commercially grown acacia species might have been involved, and APP has this data.
Acacia is one of the prime fibres sourced from the tropics. Like eucalyptus it grows quickly reaching maturity in seven years, compared to the 30 or so for spruce and other temperate forest species. APP can therefore harvest, replant and crop far faster than Scandinavian forest companies. And the Indonesian company has 2.6 million hectares of forest, “around a third the size of Scotland,” Henderson says quickly. These feed into huge pulp mills, and in turn the pulp is converted into paper or board in vast self supporting mills.
These can employ housings of local workers, with schools, hospitals, electricity and so on. If APP’s international reputation has been poor this is not always the case in its domestic market where such infrastructure may be lacking.
And print can be part of the integration. Henderson remembers on a first trip being told the mill had some printing machines. He thought that like some European mills these might be for quality control and product testing. Instead he was shown a vast press hall with ten- and 12-colour Heidelberg presses producing all manner of print. “It is very different from Europe,” he says. “Everything has the latest equipment, and apart from when expats are needed to set it up, everything is run by local managers.”
The next, and highest stage in the socialisation programme, came in February this year when the company committed itself to reforestation of 1 million hectares of rain forest and protection of the high conservation value lands where the high profile species like orang utan and tiger live.
At the same time the company is engaging with customers, taking brands and others on visits to south Asia to see for themselves what is happening to reassure them there will be no kickback from the paper and particularly folding box board used for FMCG and pharmaceutical packaging. Transparency is the order of the day, Henderson explains.
And the company is increasing its position in Europe, investing in converting facilities in Antwerp and warehousing in Latvia, Italy and Spain. It has been in the UK through Callington for more than 20 years, and while economic growth in Indonesia and China is surging ahead, wants to remain active in what is a shrinking market for graphical papers.
“As the largest paper producer in the world, this is a market we should be in,” says Henderson. “We’ve made mistakes in the past, but now we are on a truly sustainable journey and want to move to a position where we are no classified as a company where ‘there might be risk’.”
Asia Pulp & Paper is the company that Lee Henderson wanted to join. He did so three years ago, leaving a job with the Antalis head office in France where he had specialised in sustainability issues and managing the accreditations that the paper merchant needed, explaining the appeal of the new job.
