usually landfilled (waste textile, waste food scraps), or burned (agricultural residues), to create new fabrics, paper, pulp, and packaging.  These alternative materials have on average 95 per cent to 130 per cent less GHG emissions, 88 per cent to 100 per cent less land use impacts, and 5 times the lower impact on biodiversity. According to Nicole Rycroft, founder and executive director of Canopy, the organisation currently works with over 900 global brands, including H&M, Zara, Gap, Ben & Jerry’s, HH Global and Stella McCartney. “All of the brands we work with sign timelined commitments to eliminate ancient and endangered forests from their relevant supply chain,” she told Inside Retail. The laundry list Canopy’s goals are impressive. By 2033, it expects to unlock over 60,000,000 tonnes of low-carbon fibre production. It also aims to avoid 1.3 billion tonnes of emissions  –almost twice the annual emissions of Germany. Moreover, it aspires to divert nearly 800 million tonnes of agricultural residue and waste textiles from being burned or landfilled: equivalent to the weight of 76,000 Eiffel towers. Ultimately, it wants to completely eliminate the use of ancient and endangered forests in the paper, packaging, and fashion viscose supply chains.  According to Canopy’s next generation action plan, the world’s scientists have stated that mankind only has till 2030 to transform its methods of production and consumption of resources to keep global temperatures below an increase of 1.5 degrees celsius and prevent catastrophic biodiversity loss. Maintaining and restoring forests has been identified as one third of the climate solution. With the scientific community calling for 30 to 50 per cent of the world’s forests to be conserved and restored by 2030, no new or existing pulp mills should be sourcing from the world’s ancient and endangered forests. Rycroft said the organisation works with these companies to trace their supply chains, identify their impacts on the world’s climate-critical forests, and to implement solutions to move to lower-carbon, lower-impact alternatives.  “Many of our partners have also signed Letters of Intent to Purchase and commitments to purchase next gen products in the coming years, which is an excellent start,” she added. Are the goals realistic? While Rycroft acknowledges that the overall plan to protect 50 per cent of the world’s forests by 2030 is ambitious to say the least, it’s also absolutely necessary. “We have a track record of success and with a growing list of partners and supporters we’re confident we can succeed in our mission with benefits to people and the planet,” she stressed. According to Rycroft, the two biggest challenges are likely to be a well-established and entrenched wood products industry that has a vested interest in maintaining business-as-usual production, and the slow pace of change to scale up big infrastructure such as pulp mills.  From her point of view, clear market signals from brands who are genuinely interested in reducing their emission and building climate resilient supply chains will create a value proposition for conventional producers to change business as usual. “We’re just starting to mobilise infrastructure levels of investment into the next gen viscose and packaging space. We expect this space will change quite quickly,” she said. The current situation Rycroft said that an estimated 5.1 billion trees are logged every year to make paper, paper packaging, and viscose products – a significant amount of that from endangered forests.  “Keeping forests standing is one of the fastest, cheapest, most effective ways to stabilise our climate – but we can’t keep forests standing if we continue to mow them down to make pizza boxes and rayon shirts,” she opined. Canopy aims to ‘catalyse’ 60 million tonnes of new pulp production capacity being built over the next decade. This fibre will replace all ancient and endangered forest fibre currently being used in paper, packaging, pulp and viscose production. Lots of work ahead The organisation is working on establishing critical mass production in six regional hubs initially, starting with North America, India and Europe, and later Brazil, East Asia and China. It is also supporting conservation, working with local decision makers and NGO partners to translate this shift in market pressure to log forests into robust conservation economies and community-led protection. “We plan to mainstream next gen [materials] to a critical tipping point of 60M tonnes of new annual production capacity, and to help galvanise the ~78 billion USD needed to build and retrofit next gen mills globally,” Rycroft said. This shift, in her opinion, would allow for the conservation of an additional 90 million hectares of forest around the world.