2017

3259 School Students Learn to Take Care of Forest Tending and Thinning in LVM Paper School

On the last Friday of May, several thousand students from all over Latvia came together in the environment and healthy recreation festival "For a Clean Latvia", which took place in Tērvete. In its framework, JSC "Latvia's State Forests" (LVM) organised the Paper School, where the participants of the festival learned about the ways how by using paper we can help trees grow larger and stronger.

In LVM Paper School, students explored the forest management processes, especially tending of young stands. Many children were surprised that in the production of paper instead of valuable timber, small, underdeveloped or sick trees obtained in young stand tending works are used. It is done to ensure the strongest trees with adequate growth space and nutrients, which serve as the basis for sustainable forest management.

Each Paper School participant who could answer questions about how fast a forest grows, how to responsibly obtain paper, as well as those who had noticed the many different ways of using wood in our daily life were awarded a free visit to the picturesque and magical LVM Nature Park in Tērvete.

At the culmination of the event, Pigman (Cūkmens), the patron of clean forests, congratulated the winners of the secondary raw materials collection contest. Students from schools all over Latvia during the school year altogether had collected and handed over for processing 1228.2 tons of waste paper. The winners got an opportunity to head for an exciting environmental tour:

            1st place - Ķekava Secondary School

            2nd place - Daugavpils Central Secondary School

            3rd place - Ādaži Secondary School

This was the first year when JSC "Latvia's State Forests" in cooperation with LLC "Zaļā josta", the association "Zaļās mājas" and Latvia University of Agriculture Forest Faculty organised the Paper School. To promote school youth awareness of sustainable forest management and the use of renewable natural resources, also in the future every school will have an opportunity to take part in the LVM environmental education programmes and acquire facts about environmentally friendly lifestyle and responsible  economy.

“BE RESPONSIBLE - USE PAPER" FACTS

• Young and tended forests grow quickly. Every 1.3 seconds, a cubic meter of wood or one big tree grows in Latvia. Timber sufficient for one house grows every minute.
• Each year, forests in Latvia increase by around 25 million cubic metres of wood, which is equivalent to 25 million large trees. Of them, every year only 10-12 million trees are felled.
• Latvia is a country of forests - forests cover more than half the country's territory. Latvian forest areas over the last hundred years have increased twice, and they continue to grow.
• Over the past 20 years, the forest area in Europe each year has been increasing by 17 million hectares, which size-wise corresponds to 1.5 million football pitches. In Spain, this area has been increasing by 2.37 million hectares annually, in Sweden - by 1.61 million hectares, while in France - by about 1 million hectares.
• Wood is all around us, not only in a forest, but also at home, in school and shops. Wood is the largest renewable resource in Latvia, which can be used to produce not only furniture and paper, but almost everything that has ever been invented.
• In Europe, 99% of wood, which is used in paper production, originates from sustainably managed forests. Paper production does not pose a serious threat to the Amazonian forests since the main reasons for felling include acquisition of livestock areas (79.5%), growing of soybean products (16%), illegal acquisition of timber for papermaking (<1%).
• By displaying the contents of a sheet of paper on the computer screen for 3 minutes, more energy is consumed than for producing this sheet of paper.
• In order to fully decompose, a plastic bag needs 400 years, a metal can - more than 10 years, but a newspaper - only 3 months! Paper decomposes naturally, and in this process it does not generate any substances that pollute the environment.
• The paper industry is the largest consumer of renewable energy: 13% of the energy generated comes from renewable sources; 54% of it is consumed for paper production.
• Only 18% of all electrical equipment is recycled, while paper and boards are recycled in 70% of cases. Paper can be recycled 7 times. And even afterwards, energy can be produced by burning the paper.
• With active forest management - by planting and tending forests - foresters ensure that young trees accumulate more CO2 and give off more oxygen than overgrown and neglected forests. All in all, forests accumulate 15% of all global CO2 emissions, while serving as the largest land-based source of biodiversity.