What Publishers Need to Know About Foreign-Sourced Papers: A Q&A with Green Press Initiative’s Todd Pollak

As for the impacts of the pulp and paper industry on Indonesia, they are quite significant. … Pulp production [there increased] 10-fold … between 1988 and 2001, while paper production increased by more than eight times during the same time period. Global demand for paper products, as well as other forest- derived products, has resulted in deforestation on a massive scale in Indonesia, with pulp and paper accounting for half or the country’s forest-derived exports. Indonesia is seeing deforestation at rates as high as 4.5 million acres per year, and as much as 65 percent of all logging is occurring illegally. In many cases, natural forests are replaced with single-species tree plantations that can only support a tiny fraction of the biodiversity of the tropical forests they replace.