In an interview this past week with Institutional Investor, New York City, N.Y., USA, International Paper (IP), Memphis, Tenn., CEO Mark Sutton was interviewed about the business, including his opinions on the somewhat controversial and often times confusing sustainability image of paper. The following are some of the topics he was presented with:

You're in a business that produces something that everyone wants to use less of. How do you think about this issue?

Mark Sutton: We take a renewable natural resource, which is wood fiber, we add value to it, and we make a product that, in the case of the corrugated box, 90% are recycled and put back into the system. So at the beginning of life, the primary raw material is renewable, meaning you just plant more trees. And at the end of life, the box is recycled, which feeds into the system, which means over time, you need fewer trees to begin with. And so it's a pretty good story and it helps our customers when they try to tell their sustainability story, that they've got sustainable farming or sustainable practices in getting their products grown and made, and then they serve it and get it to market in a sustainable package.

 

 

Pictured above: IP CEO Mark Sutton. 

 

Sutton: We need to educate the public about what we're doing, because some of what we do in the forest, to the average person, is not intuitive. Think about our process: We take the small trees out of the forest to make room for other trees to grow, so you can make lumber, and then the whole process starts over again. IP generates 75% of our own energy from biomass waste.

Sutton: If we're using less because we want to save money and we don't think we need the hard copy, that's legitimate. Using less because it's bad for the environment is not legitimate. Electronic communications and all of that isn't impact-free; it's just we don't see it.

A lot of our customers tell us the highest return they get on their advertising, for instance, is when they use direct mail, because we actually look at it, feel it. We don't even open most of our emails. And paper has a role in education I think we're just beginning to learn about. We're teaching kids using digital devices and yet we're starting to see some research that says, well, maybe that's not the right approach for every type of learning. Kids learn when they write with a pencil or pen on paper I think paper's a pretty durable product.

Sutton: It's all about improving collection rates, and making the right thing to do the easy thing to do for the consumer. Boxes are a poster child for how it should work, but paper cups and other items aren't recycled at the highest levels. People tend to throw these in the trash and it's not as easy to recycle. So there's things you can do to improve the recovery rates. Office papers are in pretty good shape when it comes to what's recovered and fed back into the system.