Paper Trail

HI~Arts offers a suite of awards schemes for visual artists, writers, musicians and makers. These can help professionals to develop many different aspects of their practice. In the case of Sutherland-based writer MANDY HAGGITH it took her much further than most of our awards do, and, as she explains, perhaps even further than she herself had expected…
 

THEY WON’T let me into the toilet roll factory in Prudhoe, the town next to where I grew up. They say ‘the drawbridge is up’ and leave me in the street to watch lorries with ‘Do you love your bum?’ painted on their filthy back ends, driving in and out of the cuboid monstrosity with its plumes of who-knows-what billowing into the atmosphere.

I remember throughout my childhood the river ran red when the mill made pink toilet rolls and indigo when the rolls were blue, and I wonder what dirty secrets this industry has to hide.

To find out, I set out on a global quest for the source of the 250kg of paper we each use every year, a journey that takes me to 15 countries in as many weeks. Through Holland and Germany I meet environmentalists from around the world with a vision of how the paper industry should behave, and then I head off to see whether the reality matches their dream.

This lingering smell is just a faint whiff of all the toxic, bleaching, cancerous and polluting chemicals used and exuded by the world’s makers of paper

In Finland, bundled up against the snow, I watch spruce trees being felled by UPM, the biggest magazine and newspaper producer in the world, and the biggest private landowner and user of energy, water and wood in Finland.

The UPM forest manager tells me he is concerned to source wood responsibly and shows me a beautiful birch tree left standing to provide a home for woodpeckers and insects and a source of seeds for the future. But when I ask Sammi, the harvester, ‘why leave this one?’ in the otherwise clear-cut site, he explains that the manager’s car was parked where the tree might have fallen on it.

Sammi teaches me a lot that day. That birch tree stands for all the forests that are lost where there isn’t anyone parking themselves in the way.

Finland is a small country with a huge paper industry, so much of the wood it consumes actually comes from their giant next door neighbour. Russia, with more forest than any other country in the world, still has remnants of old-growth taiga, rich in wildlife like wolverines and bears, although President Putin is dead set on flogging it to the highest chainsaw-wielding bidder.

But there are Russians full of passion to preserve these precious fragments, and they even include the world’s premier manufacturer of brown paper bags, who can prove no virgin forest is squandered in making them.

His pulp mill, however, is a devil’s kitchen of corroding pipework dribbling into glistening puddles and giving off such an evil sulphurous stench that after a few hour’s visit I reek for weeks. This lingering smell is just a faint whiff of all the toxic, bleaching, cancerous and polluting chemicals used and exuded by the world’s makers of paper. It makes me a most unwelcome passenger with whom to share a cabin on the 5-day trans-Siberian train journey from Petrozavodsk east to Irkutsk.
 
Lake Baikal, Siberia, the biggest body of freshwater on the planet, symbolises the vast amounts of water abused by the paper industry. I walk out onto the ice, seeing the bubbles breathed out by this vast, unique ecosystem, believed by the local Buryat people to be a living organism.

It is polluted by one of the most controversial paper mills in the world at Baikalsk. But even they, with a bit of ‘encouragement’, are prepared to let me in, though I am unconvinced by their attempts to persuade me life thrives on the warm effluent belching from their lake-bed pipe.

Most of Baikalsk’s high-tech viscose and packaging paper is destined for China, just like much of the waste paper that we in the UK put in recycling bins. I rather surprise the manager of a Chinese recycling mill by wanting to film his mountains of English-language newspapers and magazines, but I in turn am surprised to learn that 85% of Chinese paper is not made from trees.

As well as recycling, half of China’s paper is made from rice straw and other agricultural wastes in thousands of small-scale mills. Although many are polluting, replacing them, as the Chinese government plans, with wood-based pulp mills will both ravage the Russian taiga (the only forest in the world remotely big enough to supply such vast demand) and result in loss of up to a million jobs, loss of invaluable knowledge, not to mention loss of income to all those farmers that currently sell their agricultural residues to paper mills.

The inventor of paper, some two thousand years ago, was a Chinese man called Cao, and Cao Zhang, a podgy, smiley 26-year-old man in a little town called Jingxian, keeps up the clan’s tradition of paper-making. His factory employs 100 people, including 30 artisans who make calligraphy paper by hand, one sheet at a time.
 
He is the 27th generation of Caos to have run the factory, and over the centuries it has only ceased operation for the 20 years of the Cultural Revolution, when the paper makers were sent to work at the state-owned Red Star factory. In 1986 they were allowed to return and the factory re-opened. I ask Mr Cao what his vision is for the future of the factory. He says ‘To stay like this. This is how paper making should be done.’

Cao Zhang represents one, traditional thread in the complex and paradoxical fabric of Chinese culture. Another is epitomised by the Yangtse River dam, the mega-folly drowning the homes of a million people to power industrialisation. The biggest hydro-electric project on earth, with a lock system like the steps to hell, it exemplifies the vast energy resources squandered to make paper all over the world.

At the other end of Asia, after a journey through Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, in Sumatra, Indonesia, I witness the worst plantations on the planet: monocultures of Acacia crassicarpa, an alien species from Australia that grows, triffid-like, 30 metres in 7 years by sucking water courses dry and spreading toxic herbicides through its roots and leaves.

Knee-deep in crackling, fire-dry dead vegetation, I listen to Jafri, the indigenous chief of Kuntu village, a dignified, nearly old man with a crumpled face. The first his community knew that their land had been granted to a paper company to grow Acacia was when the bulldozers arrived and began to obliterate the forest they depend on for housing, fruit, medicine, hunting, fishing and spiritual identity.

Now Jafri’s people’s tiny rice and manioc fields are infested with the seedlings of this monster tree and there are no longer fish in their river. As conflicts with paper companies APP and APRIL escalate, community protesters are losing their homes and even lives in violent clashes with the industry’s security forces.

While the government looks on, indifferent, these villagers fight legal land claims against the multinationals. It’s no surprise which side wins most of such cases.

Jafri is just one of the millions of forest-dependent people worldwide whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the paper industry. Furious and tired, my quest takes me across the Pacific ocean where mirror images of his story play out in Uruguay, Brazil and Chile and even among the First Nations of the world’s wealthiest country.

Another land with huge forest resources, Canada is the UK’s primary source of pulp, 90% of which is logged out of old-growth forests, most belonging to and therefore destroyed with the tacit approval of Queen Elizabeth II. Here I see clear-cuts eating even into a UNESCO biosphere reserve – is there nowhere the paper companies will not go?

In Canada’s forest I listen to Joe Martin, a Clayoquot First Nation wolf-clan man, singing to a wolf pack that bays, yips and ululates back to him from their great red-cedar rainforest home. Joe used to be a logger, taking chainsaws to 1000-year-old trees, which, he says, made him sick to his stomach until he saw the error of his ways.

Fortunately, this error is being recognised by more and more of us. I leave Canada inspired by a revolution in the book world in which over 80 publishers have ganged up to print books on ‘ancient forest friendly’ paper.

The last person I meet is Cindy Connor, production manager with Raincoast books, the woman who gets Harry Potter books printed on recycled paper. She tells me how she realised that signing a big purchase order ‘was like signing a death warrant’ unless it was for recycled paper.

Cindy personifies the way each one of us can make a real and life-saving difference by using less paper and choosing a recycled brand. When we part, she shakes my hand and says ‘It feels great to change the world’.

Back home, they still won’t let me into the toilet roll factory. Love your bum? My arse.

© Mandy Haggith, 2006