It’s a safe bet that few people will try to encourage users of Kimberly-Clark’s primary products to “go paperless,” although talking on a mobile phone during allergy season is probably the closest we will come to an e-Kleenex. And while the company has made some questionable decisions in the past vis-à-vis sustainability, they are continuing the process of trying to clean up their act, an initiative that began with a Greenpeace smackdown a couple years ago. As part of their truce with Greenpeace, Kimberly-Clark agreed to set a goal to procure 40% of its fiber from recycled or FSC-certified sources by 2011. As it happened, they were ahead of schedule, with 42.6% of its fiber from these sources by the end of 2009, and part of the company’s ambitious Sustainability 2015 program was to achieve 100% certified fiber. (The problem with Kimberly-Clark’s practices wasn’t that they were harvesting well-managed forests designed for timber products; as readers of this blog know, that in and of itself is not unsustainable. Rather, they were taking trees from Canada’s ancient old-growth boreal forests, which is an unsustainable practice.) So kudos to Kimberly-Clark for, shall we say, seeing the forest for the trees. Last week, at the Rio+20 UN conference, the company announced another long-term initiative, to cut in half its use of wood fiber by 2025. GreenBiz has an interview with Suhas Apte, vice president of Global Sustainability at Kimberly-Clark. A large part of the company’s new initiative will focus on alternative fibers:

our strategy for reducing our forest fiber footprint includes the use of “alternate fibers”, but may also include the increased use of certified, rapidly-growing plantation tree fiber and other yet to be determined innovation/approaches. Neither virgin tree fiber nor traditional recycled fibers are included in the term “alternate fibers.” Two characteristics of some of the alternate fibers we use are rapid renewability - meaning they are able to regenerate themselves in less than 10 years, such as bamboo and agricultural byproducts – meaning they are “leftovers” from growing crops, such as the wheat straw leftover from harvesting grain. Bamboo and agricultural byproducts such as what straw are two examples of materials we will be using to replace forest-derived fibers.

Apte also says:

In addition, more than 1.6 billion people worldwide depend directly on natural forests for their livelihood, food, clothing, and shelter. Almost half of the earth’s original forest cover is gone, much of it removed within the past three decades, and with world population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, pressure on these important resources continues to grow.

But how much of that forest removal was due to the paper products industry, and how much of it was due to removal of the forests for other purposes, such as farmland, residential purposes, or industrial development? Again, as the Going Greenosphere knows, the solution to protecting the forests isn’t to stop using the forests; that only makes them prey to removal for other, non-forest uses, such as real estate.