Day 056 - 28 Nov 94 - Page 51
1 products will be made from virgin fibre of the kind we have
2 been describing because, for health and food contact
3 reasons, it should be made that way, as I believe it has
4 been said in this court, sir, McDonald's have insisted on a
5 high percentage of recycled fibre in the packaging
6 materials they purchase; I have been told at one time that
7 it was 72 per cent and if that is the case, then our
8 discussion becomes almost impossible to define. Parameters
9 are from one end of the scale of recycled 100 per cent to
10 entire virgin fibre which we have been talking about of
11 this nature.
12
13 Q. Just pause there a moment. Are the figures you have put in
14 your statement for McDonald's on the basis that all the
15 packaging, be it paper bags or cardboard boxes, which
16 McDonald's use is coming from fresh timber, if I can put it
17 that way, without taking account, in other words, of the
18 proportions which are recycled paper?
19 A. Again there is a problem in this, because recycling has
20 different connotations. If one is using recycling in terms
21 of waste material, calculations are used where sawmill
22 residues and fibre for that purpose are included.
23
24 Q. Post-consumer recycled?
25 A. Consumer recycled, this does not refer to consumer;
26 this calculation does not refer to consumer recycled at
27 all, because what we are talking about here is the amount
28 of timber needed and the forest area to provoid that timber
29 which will make a given volume of paper and value without
30 taking recycling into account.
31
32 MR. MORRIS: Yes, but the figures you were given by McDonald's,
33 if you look on page 6 at the top, had excluded the alleged
34 recycled material content.
35
36 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
37
38 THE WITNESS: As it was presented to me I took that tonnage and
39 produced it in terms of excluding recycled material.
40
41 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Just pause there again. All I want to know
42 at the moment is if carton board comes out at so many
43 tonnes of pulp for 1,000 tonnes of carton board, can you
44 give me how many tonnes of pulpwood plus tonnes of sawmill
45 residue for what I might describe as ordinary paper? The
46 only reason I am asking, might it be as different as half
47 as much or twice as much, or is it going to be within 20 or
48 20 per cent of the carton board figures or some other
49 percentage or can you just not say?
50 A. My Lord, the conversion from tonnage of paper in a
51 sense is the yield from the forest resource. A tonne will
52 produce a mileage of thin paper and rather less of thick
53 paper. When it comes to cartoon board, obviously, less in
54 terms carton board surface area when it is a thick carton
55 board. So tonnage is a reasonable calculation to use when
56 moving from the product of the forest which is measured in
57 metre cube which is approximately 1 metre cube to the
58 tonne; that is an approximate figure at a certain stage in
59 that calculation. In simple answer, the tonnage factor is
60 a perfectly reasonable measurement tool whatever the type
