Environmental protection every day
Minding the environment is a part of the daily operations at Georgia-Pacific. Environmental protection and ecological efficiency are among the company's core values. We were the first Nordic manufacturer of tissue paper to certify our environmental system at the beginning of 1998. Our ISO 14001 compliant environmental management system belongs to the family of international standards, just like our quality system.
The Ultimatic tissue products are proud to carry the Nordic ecolabel, the Swan label. This ecolabel gives consumers a guarantee that the product meets stringent environmental criteria.
Our product development takes the environment into consideration because we understand that unnecessary paper consumption places a burden on the environment. The burden on the environment can be lightened even with just a small reduction in paper consumption. When developing products for public facilities, our governing idea is reducing consumption. Both the customers and users are interested in high quality solutions that help reduce the overall consumption without compromising quality. The Ultimatic hand towel dispenser is an excellent example of such a solution: it only dispenses one sheet at a time, significantly reducing consumption and hence burdening the environment less than other options.
Continuous development of environmental management
Our environmental policy is guided by the principles of continuous development and evaluation. We strive to develop solutions that are clearly better for the environment and to reduce the effect of our products on the environment. We consider the environmental effects in the selection of raw material fibre, chemicals and packaging materials, not to mention the planning of production processes and distribution.
The Ultimatic tissue is manufactured from high quality recycled fibre. Using tissue made of recycled fibre is an effective way to reduce environmental effects: it saves natural resources and at the same time decreases the amount of waste. We make the recycled fibre from sorted recovered paper primarily in our own deinking plant. The bleaching agent used in deinking is hydrogen peroxide that breaks down to water and oxygen after the process.
The process cleaning agents that we use in the tissue production do not contain aromatic or halogenated hydrocarbons. Wastewaters from production are processed in our own biological treatment plant using an activated sludge process. The maximum amounts of effluents released into water systems (biological oxygen consumption, chemical oxygen consumption, phosphorus) remain clearly below the permission limits set by the authorities. We create no sulphur emissions, and our nitrogen oxide emissions are low. We buy our process heat (steam) from a plant that uses natural gas as fuel.
All waste from processing and other operations are collected and sorted as carefully as possible on sites where they were generated. A majority of waste is recycled or reused as raw material or energy. In particular, we have succeeded in reusing deinking waste, fibrous clay residue, in the aggregate industry.
The Ultimatic tissues are packaged in environmentally friendly cardboard boxes. Cardboard packaging is easy to recycle or burn.