Evaluating Paper's Carbon Footprint

These days, you won’t find a topic that’s much hotter than global climate change...no pun intended. You can’t turn on a TV, pick up a newspaper, or attend any paper industry-related conference without hearing about greenhouse gases, their effect on our planet, and what we should be doing to reduce our collective carbon footprint.

"But before any of us—paper manufacturers, buyers, and users—can hope to reduce our footprint, we have to know how much carbon we’re talking about and where it’s coming from," says Craig Liska, vice president for sustainability at Verso Paper Corp., Memphis. "So the first question becomes, how do we measure the carbon footprint of paper products?"

To answer this simple question, Verso undertook an extremely complex challenge.