Reducing Consumption - Environmental Paper Network

From Paper-First to Digital-First: Securities & Exchange Commission Takes a Major Step Forward

At a Glance The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed a new approach to delivering required investor disclosures electronically. The proposal would allow electronic delivery by default while preserving investors’ ability to request paper documents, free of charge. An analysis published by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) estimated that more […]

Historic Opportunity to Reduce Unnecessary Paper: U.S. DOL Advances Electronic Delivery Reform

At a Glance The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed modernizing how employer-sponsored group health plans deliver required disclosures under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). The proposal would allow group health plans to make electronic delivery the default, while preserving every participant’s right to request paper documents. Under current ERISA requirements, […]

Billions of pages and dollars saved. One simple policy change.

A new Environmental Paper Network analysis finds that modernizing outdated ERISA health plan disclosure rules by allowing electronic delivery by default, while preserving consumers’ right to receive paper communications, could save the equivalent of 366,000 tons of wood (more than 2 million trees) every year, reduce more than 1 billion pounds of greenhouse gas […]

Fibre Excellence: bioenergy subsidies have pushed the largest French pulp company to bankruptcy

Cellulose factory in St Gaudens (France). © Jean Paul Alandry, Wikipedia Commons Licence. The largest remaining pulp company in France, Fibre Excellence, has filed for bankruptcy and its fate will be known soon. Wood market distortions created by bioenergy subsidies have destroyed the company’s inefficient bioelectricity business, and the French State has been asked […]

A Simple SEC Reform With Big Benefits for Investors, Environment

This article was originally published in DC Journal on June 1, 2026, and is republished here with permission. By Elizabeth S. Underwood, Ph.D. Director, Environmental Paper Network North America A simple regulatory change at the Securities and Exchange Commission could eliminate hundreds of millions of pages of paper waste each year while improving how investors […]

Pulping Unfair Incentives: Separating EU Policies from Paper Industry Interests

This briefing documents the subsidies flowing to the pulp and paper sector, their social and ecological impacts in Finland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, and offers a credible alternative vision for where that funding should go. It finds that although the pulp and paper industry is dominated by a few giant conglomerates, it has an outsized and […]

Protect Forests: NGOs Demand UNFAO Action on Over-Extraction on International Day of Forests

Join Our Call: UNFAO stop promoting wood extraction at scale on International Day of Forests March 21st is the UN’s annual International Day of Forests. NGOs and civil society groups are asking why the expansion of wood extraction at scale is being promoted in its official messaging? The International Day of Forests is organised by […]

A Win For Forests in Galicia

A success story of popular resistance against pulp plantations and for forest conservation. Feb 23 – Our global movement for the protection of forests celebrated a major win: after a long battle, it is now clear that the new pulp mill will not be built by the Portuguese paper company Altri. Last Friday, the Galician […]

Take a Stance & Join Refuse Single-Use Day!

Single-Use Packaging has dominated our modern lives. The cost to our forests is immense: 3 billion are cut down every year for paper packaging alone. Single-use packaging has been on the rise for the last decades, as consumption increases and a disposability mentality spreads not only in the Global North, but increasingly in the Global […]