Wood

Wood is the essential raw material for all of our virgin paper-based products. From wood fibre Mondi produces pulp, the basic ingredient of all paper and paper-based packaging. We utilise pulp in our own production and also wholesale it to third parties.

Forestry

Mondi owns or leases 385,000 hectares of land in South Africa of which 230,000 is planted with hardwoods (e.g. eucalyptus) and softwoods (e.g. pine and spruce).

We also hold logging rights to 2.1 million hectares of mainly softwood forests in Russia. Together, this provides an annual allowable cut of 9,2 million m^3, making us potentially self-sufficent in wood for 50% of our pulp-production needs.

We remain committed to a programme of forestry excellence to ensure that the productive capability, biological integrity and community needs of the forests that we own, manage or lease are considered at all times.

This means a sustained wood supply for our pulp and paper mills while maintaining high forestry standards in our own operations. We also require our contracted fibre suppliers to adhere to these standards. We have developed our own systems and procedures for the responsible procurement of wood, virgn fibre and biomass to ensure that all wood and fibre we use is always sourced from sustainably-managed forests. In 2008, in line with our commitment to use only wood from controlled sources, we completed the implementation of our wood tracing system, sourced 53% of our virgin fibre from credibly certified sources and used no fibre from areas defined as high risk by the FSC standard.

Our plantations forests in South Africa were successfully awarded Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) recertification in 2007.

Each year, Mondi replenishes its forestry assets with extensive replanting programmes. In South Africa we established/replanted 23,000 hectares or 10% of plantations in 2008, while in Russia forests are regenerated via natural re-growth.

Pulp