Responsibly-managed forests are effective absorbers of CO2
The beverage carton industry is committed to limiting the impact of beverage cartons on the environment by sourcing its main material – paperboard – from responsibly-managed and growing forests.
Trees absorb CO2 in order to grow through a process called photosynthesis. This is where the trees combine CO2, water and light to make fibre and fruits and build stores of energy. It is during this process that they release oxygen and this is the reason why forests are called the ‘lungs of the earth’. So the more trees that grow, the more CO2 is absorbed. Young forests, in particular, need a lot of carbon as they grow.
So, growing forests, i.e. forests where trees are replaced at a rate greater than their harvest, are good to help mitigating climate change. A recent study has shown that the need for ever-growing areas of European forests to be conserved for bio-diversity reasons, together with the demand for end timber products, has led to such effective forest management that today’s European forests are actually increasing in value for their potential to capture carbon.
These forests produce a greater yield of wood per hectare and thus increasingly absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere per hectare. This carbon is then retained within the tree and its future wood pulp products, such as the beverage carton, for the whole life of the product. Of course, if the fibres are then recycled into new products, the carbon is locked in for even longer.
Forest management and carbon impact
Remarkably, while the overall area of forest in Finland has remained largely unchanged between 1912 and 2005, the forests have increased in value in the fight against climate change due to increases in the average tree size and stocking density. This co-benefit of managed forestry, motivated by the commercial need to increase timber yields, has led to an increased biomass stock in Finnish forests sequestering 18 tons of CO2 annually per km², versus CO2 emissions in the same region of 12 tons per km².¹
On a European scale, it is estimated that from 1990 to 2005 expanding forest biomass in the EU27 sequestered 360–495 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year – corresponding to 8-10 per cent of the EU's fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions. ¹
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Source: 1. Rautiainen, A., et al., Carbon gains and recovery from degradation of forest biomass in European Union during 1990–2005. Forest Ecol. Manage. (2009)