Hundreds of people have now made a Shrink pledge to reduce their paper use, collectively saving more than 33,000 tonnes of paper, 3 million litres of water, 200,000kg of greenhouse gases and 40 tonnes of other pollution, plus of course hundreds of trees. And the paper industry has already noticed!

The Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) has responded to the Shrink project by acknowledging that 'there is an element of waste in our current consumption patterns and we applaud the NGOs for addressing it.' The industry umbrella organisation invites us to work with them to 'ensure that waste is not lost but recycled'. While we agree that recycling our paper waste is important, we want to emphasise that the point of the Shrink project is to prevent waste in the first place by reducing consumption. Recycling is helpful, but it cannot reduce our environmental footprints enough on its own.

Sadly, CEPI seems to have its head in the sand over the climate change impacts of paper consumption. The paper industry is responsible for its share of the 20% of global climate emissions due to deforestation and forestry and we believe CEPI and other paper industry bodies need to look more carefully at the climate change impacts of the full life cycle of paper - including forestry, production, transportation and disposal.

CEPI is worried that if this project is successful it will be 'responsible for the loss of thousands of jobs in Europe', yet the industry body knows full well that European job losses due to relocation of the paper industry out of Europe are already happening irrespective of paper consumption levels by Europeans. The same global restructuring is seeing paper mills closing across North America as well. Continued consumption of forest products, energy and water at our current unsustainable levels will not help to maintain jobs in the long term anyway.

We support measures by the paper industry to become more sustainable and we are open to working with the industry to improve its environmental and social performance, indeed many of the organisations in our network do work closely with progressive paper companies, who recognise that encouraging efficient use of this valuable material is good for their business.

Finally, CEPI accuses us of 'promoting other materials that do not have the same environmental credentials' as paper. Let's make this really clear: we are not advocating the use of other materials such as plastics as alternatives to paper, rather we are advocating a reduction in paper use as part of an overall reduction in consumption to reduce our environmental footprint.

It's good to see that the paper industry is taking notice!