The total volume of paper recycled in Europe stagnated in 2010 due to limited supply of recyclable materials, according to a final monitoring report from the European Recovered Paper Council (ERPC), a cross-industry recycling association. Despite the great technologic improvements, paper recycling is going slower and for the fist time in 2010 the recycling rate in Europe declined to 68.9% from 72.2% in the previous year. At the same time, paper consumption keep increasing: in the first months of 2010, graphic paper consumption increased by 3.8%, while consumption of packaging grades rose by 9.0% in comparison with the first months of 2009.

It is no surprise that deforestation still goes on at an alarming rate: every year. According to the FAO, around 13 million hectares of forests globally were converted to other uses or lost each year, and this figures is still very conservative, since FAO, considers the trees plantations as forest, failing to register the negative impacts of conversion from natural rainforests in industrial tree plantation. The last alarming news is the rapid expansion into the European market of paper products linked to deforestation in Indonesia. One of the major forest offender, the paper giant Asia Pulp & Paper, launched an aggressive market campaign to expand its business in Europe. As result, European imports from Asia rose by 14.1% last year.