Mandy Haggith is a freelance writer, researcher and activist. She has spent the past decade campaigning for the world’s forests, including lobbying at the United Nations, working as a consultant for Greenpeace and WWF and writing articles for Pulp and Paper International and Resurgence magazine. While researching her book, Paper Trails, Mandy traveled to forests around the world, toured paper and pulp mills, and was "face to face" with both those in - and those affected by - the forest products industry. Her book is fascinating and challenging. Hear what she has to say to us: WTT: Your book challenges all of us in the Graphic Arts industry since we are in the business of using paper for communication and promotion. What do you think is the number one effort or initiative that our industry should be looking at to reduce the pressure on the world's forests? MH: I want to make it clear right from the start that I am not anti-paper. I love paper! I cherish the role that it plays in our culture and I think we can't underestimate the importance it plays in enabling us to communicate ideas across space and time. The most important thing is to look at how to make the most efficient use possible of paper - treating it as a precious resource. The starting point for this is to realize that waste is in nobody's interest and costs money. We need to design waste out of the supply chain, for example by designing printed work to be a shape and size that makes optimal use of paper stock. In some cases it may be possible to work up the supply chain to encourage manufacturers to make stock to fit the end-use precisely. However, a huge amount of waste is caused by simply printing more copies of documents than there are people who want to read them, which leads to unsold magazines, unread promotional material and unsolicited direct mail that is dumped unopened. There is a huge amount the printed paper industry can and must do to reduce such waste, and it will save money by doing so. For example, we need new distribution and shelf-replenishment systems for magazines that take advantage of print-on-demand technology to print only as many copies as actually sell. A lot of mail-order sales are going online, where catalogues can be kept up-to-date more easily than on paper and promotions can be targeted more effectively. WTT: What have you learned during your research about "tree-free" papers? The June issue of Canadian Geographic Magazine was described as the first North American magazine printed on paper made from wheat-straw waste. The actual content was 20% wheat straw, 40% recycled fibre content and 40% wood pulp. MH: Taking the long view, in terms of the 2000 year history of paper it is only relatively recently that it has been made predominantly from tree fibres. In Scotland up until the mid-nineteenth century there was a regulation prohibiting paper-making from anything other than waste from the textile industry. There are many ways our society could invent new industrial ecologies, enabling paper-making to derive much more of its raw materials from waste products. China is the best example of where this happens: 85% of Chinese paper production is not from virgin wood pulp. About half is recycled and the other half is from agricultural residues like rice straw and bagass. We urgently need to learn from the Chinese about how to make more use of fibres from agricultural residues in Europe and North America. Apart from anything else it could provide a welcome income stream to farmers. WTT: We hear over and over again: "Use less paper." Unfortunately for those of us in the Graphic Arts industry that implies printing less and, in turn, less money to be shared across the industry. What are your thoughts about using paper more effectively and efficiently? MH: Using less paper need not imply less money being shared across the communications industry. The money comes into the system from end-users who pay for a service, and the use of paper and other natural resources to deliver that service is a cost within the system. When people buy communication services they don't care whether they are delivered on a certain number of pages of paper, they just want the transfer of ideas to happen. If we can find ways to transfer those ideas using fewer natural resources, we should find that costs are reduced while end-users continue to pay for the service. Thus resource efficiency should be good news economically, as well as environmentally. WTT: In your book you point to facial tissues, toilet tissue, paper towels and paper napkins as being particularly problematic since they are papers that are "used once and tossed." It seems to me paper comes in a variety of forms with a wide range of value for final application; what are your thoughts? MH: Absolutely. A big part of paper's fascination for me is its incredible diversity and variety of application. I don't have a problem with some paper products having a short lifespan. Toilet paper and daily newspapers, for example, are inevitably ephemeral. What concerns me is that the quality and durability of resources should match their use. It is appropriate to use a high-quality virgin tree pulp to make paper for printing art books but it is not appropriate for photocopy paper or flyers. The use of virgin tree fibres to make hygiene tissues that are inherently unrecyclable is a travesty of inefficient resource use. In the UK we have seen a massive increase in the recycled content of newsprint in recent years, and this seems to be the right way to go. We need to find ways for paper fibres to have as long a life-cycle as possible - like cats they could have nine lives if we improved our recycling systems and strengthened the market for recycled products. And this is where people in the printing and communications industry are important and powerful agents for change, because they can ask paper manufacturers to create more environmentally-friendly papers, with higher recycled content for example, to meet their needs. Then with each order placed for forest-friendly paper stock, they can know that they have saved huge amounts of trees, water, energy, climate change emissions and other pollution.