THE ENVIRONMENTAL PAPER SUMMIT
and the COMMON VISION

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Just before Thanksgiving 2002, 75 members of 56 environmental groups from the U.S., Canada, Indonesia and the U.K. gathered together to join in an unprecedented commitment to cooperation in furthering their work towards an environmentally and socially sustainable paper production system.

The Environmental Paper Summit launched networking and collaboration among groups promoting the use of environmental papers, as well as laid the framework for outreach to paper purchasers, producers and suppliers; community and social justice groups; labor unions; and all the other entities necessary to create a paper production system good for the earth.

Ten environmental groups - Conservatree, the Center for a New American Dream, Co-op America, Dogwood Alliance, Environmental Defense, ForestEthics, the Green Press Initiative, Markets Initiative, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Recycled Products Puchasing Cooperative - formed the steering committee that organized the conference. They also drafted a Common Vision as a positive proposal for guiding the transformation to environmentally sustainable systems.

It is intended as a framework broad enough to encompass all the groups' work. While as a consensus document it represents the minimum competency acceptable to all the groups, there is plenty of room within it for efforts to maximize the best of different environmental aspects. It is also intended to be a dynamic document that will grow and change with market and system development.

The success of the Summit made it obvious how great is the need for an ongoing Environmental Paper Network of groups working globally towards environmentally sustainable paper production. Visit our EPN website to find out what we're doing now and our latest news.