Photo Gallery Rainforests Dying for Children's Books
A new study published on Monday by the German branch of the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) reports that nearly 30 percent of the country's children books use paper that includes fibers from rainforest trees.
Of the children's books tested, 22 out of the 79 contained a significant amount of wood harvested from rainforests. This wood pulp comes, in large part, from the Indonesian island of Sumatra and is produced into paper in China. Here, a combination of photos from a Greenpeace aerial survey of the Sumatra rainforest. The area at right is on the edge of a protected region and was cleared to make pulpwood for paper.
The environmental group Eyes on the Forest estimates that since Asia Pulp & Paper has been active in Indonesia, the company has been responsible for the destruction of more than 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of rain forest, cutting into the habitats of Sumatra tigers, elephants and orangutans.
China leads the world in both paper export and wood pulp import, bringing in more than 15.2 million tons of the stuff in 2011 for paper production. Meanwhile the number of children's books imported into Germany from China and Hong Kong increased 12-fold between 2000 and 2011. Here, a July protest outsie of a Chinese paper factory. The protest was against pollution from the factory rather than rainforest destruction.
A photo taken by Greenpeace at the beginning of this year showing forest land cleared by a supplier to Asia Pulp and Paper on the island of Sumatra.
"By enjoying cheap production in the Far East, publishers are accepting the deforestation of the rainforest," says Johannes Zahnen, whose in charge of forestry policy and business partnering at WWF Germany. Here, an image of clearcut areas close to the Bukit Tigapuluh wildlife reserve on Sumatra.
After fiction, children's books are the second largest segment of the German book market, generating more than 12 billion ($12.5 billion) in revenue in 2011.
