Executive Voices

Sustainable Forestry
Our future and the environment require responsible management

By Steven R. Rogel

Weyerhaeuser Co. has just completed 100 years of caring for our lands, our forests and our communities. As we continue to grow and face the challenges of the next century of our company's life, we expect to change to meet these new challenges. One thing that won't change, however, is our commitment to environmental responsibility.

High standards of environmental performance are embedded in our core values. For decades, we've focused on practicing sustainable forestry, reducing pollution and conserving natural resources.

We manage our forestlands to ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy them and all their resources. We do so by reforesting promptly after harvesting, protecting and enhancing water quality and fish habitat, and participating in a variety of cooperative efforts.

One such effort in North Carolina is a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund to better understand how commercial forest management impacts wildlife habitats in different coastal plains' ecosystems. We also demonstrate our commitment to sustainable forestry by adhering to the principles of the American Forest and Paper Association's Sustainable Forestry InitiativeSM. Our forestry and conservation practices will ensure that future generations have abundant forests to meet their needs for wood and paper products, clean air and water, wildlife, and recreation.

For Weyerhaeuser employees, environmental performance means more than merely complying with regulations. We also work to reduce pollution by decreasing waste and increasing operational efficiency. While our progress in this area is incremental from year to year, over the long term it has been significant. Through our Minimum Impact Manufacturing strategy, we prevent pollution by finding ways to capture, reuse or recycle our process byproducts -- or reduce them altogether.

Additionally, over the past decade, we've invested almost three-quarters of a billion dollars at our pulp and paper mills in New Bern and Plymouth. This financial commitment has enabled us to improve product quality for our customers, increase process reliability, more efficiently reuse process chemicals and improve our overall environmental performance.

We not only care about how our operations impact the environment, but our products as well. Environmentally conscious consumers can feel good about buying and using them. Almost all wood and paper products are biodegradable and potentially recyclable. They require less energy to produce than products made from metals, petrochemical-based plastics, or cement. And through modern forestry, it's possible to provide all the wood products people need and still maintain the forest cover the world requires for clean water, habitat for plants and animals, and removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Depending on the region, modern forestry can grow from three to ten times the volume of wood per acre as an unmanaged forest -- and much more quickly. This provides society the opportunity to have wood products on a sustainable basis without placing demands on the world's most ecologically significant natural forests -- or those that people wish to preserve for scenic, recreational or other purposes.

We at Weyerhaeuser are committed to playing an important role in this future success story. Responsible forest companies like Weyerhaeuser Co. don't just manage our forests to produce healthy trees. We manage them for soil conservation, air and water quality, wildlife and fish habitat and cultural, historic and aesthetic values. As North Carolina's largest private landowner, we take this ethic seriously. We manage about 70,000 of our 565,000 acres of North Carolina forestland for those values other than the commercial production of timber.

Companywide, we also use every portion of the logs we bring to our sawmills, reuse 98 percent of the chemicals required for making paper, and generate two-thirds of the energy we need for pulp and paper mills from the manufacturing process itself. Additionally, we obtain 40 percent of the wood fibers needed for our paper products from recycled wastepaper, and we minimize our impact on the land, air and water.

A remaining challenge is to encourage all nations to adopt laws and regulations to promote sustainability to benefit the world's economy and its environment. One approach is to create laws and regulations that promote partnerships among business, the public and government. In our complex world, partnerships are more and more being increasingly viewed as the solution to the problems we face -- whether political, social or environmental.

In North Carolina, there's a lot of activity on this front. The state is looking at Environmental Excellence legislation that will accomplish just that kind of partnership and produce positive environmental result. Working together, we can make North Carolina, our country and the world an even better place in which to live and do business.

Steven R. Rogel is chairman, president and CEO of Weyerhaeuser Co.