Fri, May 22, 2015 page9

• Electronics icon takes on new role as defender of forests

  Apple is providing funds to improve forest management and to help buy tracts of forests in the US and China as part of its drive toward more sustainable packaging

  • By Ucilia Wang / The Guardian
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  Apple is carving out a status for itself as a forest defender. That is the role the electronics giant has assumed in an effort to increase the sustainable forestry pulp and paper supply that it needs for packaging.

  On May 11, Apple announced a plan to work with the WWF to improve the management of 404,685 hectares of forests in China. This follows the iPhone maker’s announcement last month to donate money to the Conservation Fund to buy and protect 404,685 hectares of forests from commercial development other than forestry product production in the US states of Maine and North Carolina.

  Forest preservation groups welcomed the move, saying Apple’s motivation and its conservation approach set it apart from other corporate efforts to use more sustainably harvested forest products. A more common corporate practice is to only buy forest products that have been certified as sustainable by a recognized group.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  The company’s near-cult following puts it in a strong position to effectively raise public awareness about forest protection and influence other businesses to follow suit.

  “What’s exciting is that a company of Apple’s profile is doing this. They are good at marketing,” University of Maine forestry professor Robert Lilieholm said.

  “It’s tying the producers with the supply chain and customers. Other companies are going to look at this and think they might want to try to do the same,” Lilieholm said.

  OFFERING PROTECTION

  In both the US and China projects, Apple is ponying up undisclosed sums to enable the nonprofit groups to improve the farming and logging practices of those forests that already have been producing raw materials for packaging.

  Those forests do not have to be supplying products to Apple and its contract manufacturers, however. The company wants to protect enough forests that produce the equivalent amount of virgin fiber — tree or plant fibers that have not previously been used — that Apple needs.

  Apple’s head of environmental initiatives, Lisa Jackson, said in a blog post that the company plans to achieve 100 percent offset of its virgin fiber use in other ways, such as designing smaller, more compact packaging, relying more on recycled paper and buy paper, and “sourcing paper sustainably.”

  Apple’s investments in forest management promises to both increase the supply of sustainable pulp and paper goods and carry out better wildlife protection plans, said Kerry Cesareo, senior director for forests for the US office of the WWF.

  “This is a unique opportunity to produce products, such as papers and packaging, from sustainable sources and to provide other benefits of well managed forests, such as biodiversity, habitat for wildlife and livelihood for people who live around those forests,” Cesareo said.

  Whether Apple and its nonprofit partners could deliver on those promises remain to be seen. Both projects are design to roll out over several years and will depend on who the nonprofits line up as buyers or partners in completing the plans.

  ‘VIRGIN’ OR ‘CONTROLLED’

  Neither Apple nor the two nonprofits are willing to disclose how Apple accounts for its virgin fiber use, a calculation that affects how many hectares of forests Apple might want to include in its sustainable forest management effort.

  According to Apple’s sustainability site, the 14,568 hectares in the eastern US that Apple paid for should produce enough materials to offset “nearly half” of the virgin fiber the company used to package iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and Apple TV during its 2014 fiscal year.

  During that year, 80 percent of the paper and corrugated cardboard for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV products came from certified forests, recycled materials or from “controlled wood.”

  The latter refers to sources that are not certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council, but meet requirements that allow them to be mixed in with certified-forest materials without losing the certification logo.

  For the US project, Apple’s money enabled the Conservation Fund to buy and own the two forests.

  For each forest, Conservation Fund plans to create a management plan and an easement that prohibits subdivision or commercial development such as building malls and residential communities. It will then sell the land to forest product producers who must carry out the management plan and abide by the easement, said Larry Selzer, chief executive of the Virginia-based nonprofit.

  Apple is the first corporate donor for a Conservation Fund program to protect working forests. Instead of using donations to buy and set aside land from any commercial development, Conservation Fund now looks for donors and properties that could continue to produce commercial timber. The idea is to ensure those forests will be managed to protect old-growth trees or trees in sensitive habitat corridors, for example, before selling them and generating income to buy more working forests.

  The ability to raise new project funds through selling forests is critical for protecting huge tracks of forests that are in danger of being sold and cleared for commercial development, Selzer said.

  Of the 169.96 million hectares of logged forests across the country, 18.2 million hectares are at risk of being sold and become subdivided or cleared for housing or other businesses, he said.

  INVESTMENT DEALS

  Many of these properties are owned by investment funds that bought the land over the past 15 years, during which a huge shift of forest ownership from timber and paper product companies to developers and institutional investors such as pension funds and university endowments took place, Selzer said.

  Now some of these funds are near the end of their 10 to 15-year investment cycle, and their money managers could sell them.

  “This is the biggest land conservation challenge in the country today. We lose almost 500,000 acres [202,343 hectares] of forests a year,” Selzer said.

  For the China project, the WWF plans to identify working forests and persuade their owners, who are most likely state-owned companies, to create management plans that aim to improve both yields and wildlife and habitat protection, Cesareo said.

  The project, set to take five years, will incorporate sustainable forestry practices created by the Forestry Stewardship Council and plans to apply that to 283,280 hectares of forests, Cesareo said.

  The nonprofit also intends to work with owners of another 121,405 hectares to obtain the forestry council’s certification. Most of the forests are in the five provinces in southern China, including Fujian, Guangdong and Yunnan.

  The WWF has already successfully worked with Chinese forest owners to get the forestry council’s certification for about 2.7 million hectares, Cesareo said.

  Forestry companies usually are interested in improving how they grow and log timber efficiently and supply certified materials that meet the demand of customers such as Apple. China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper, and majority of the forest materials come from overseas.

  “Responsible forest management will yield greater efficiency and volumes --—that’s a good business proposition,” Cesareo said.
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