Nichols works in many ways to reduce our environmental footprint as a company and we also attempt to bring sustainable solutions to our customers. We rely on our supply partners to bring innovative products to the market and fortunately we have many great suppliers that to work with with and SCA Tissue is one of them. SCA recently announced they will become two separate companies. One will continue to operate as SCA, the forest products company that will include forest products operations and all forest land currently owned by the Group and the other will become known as Essity, the hygiene and health business areas of Personal Care. Read more about this transition.
Why should you consider sustainable paper solutions? The best way to express the benefits is to share the environmental impact numbers from 2016 for the amount of paper products that Nichols purchased for customer use.
In 2016 Nichols purchased 2,966,254 total pounds of paper products from SCA (Essity) for our customer’s use. Here are the calculated savings by purchasing and selling products that contain post-consumer recycled content (post-consumer waste definition: Once a material or finished product has served its intended use and has been diverted or recovered from waste destined for disposal, it is then considered “post-consumer.” Having completed its life as a consumer item):
- To produce that 2,966,254 pounds of usable paper product 3,856,130 pounds of recycled waste paper was used
- By using this recycled paper waste, 13,496,456 gallons of water was saved versus making paper from virgin materials
- 5,784 cubic yards of landfill space was saved by using this recycled paper waste
- 7,905,067 Kw of energy was saved by using this recycled paper waste
- 732,665 gallons of oil was saved
- 115,864 pounds of air pollutants were saved
To make it easy for customers to make sustainable paper choices, SCA (now Essity) chooses to certify many of their products. You will see the following third-party green certification labels: EcoLogo, Green Seal or both. Products also meet the requirements of EPA’s Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines (CPG) program to promote the use of materials recovered from municipal solid waste (MSW). The standard for Commercial/Industrial Sanitary Tissue can be found here.