Asia Pulp & Paper
Joined HCSA August 2014
Category: Plantation Company
Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) Sinar Mas is a pulp & paper manufacturer. Headquartered in Indonesia, APP Sinar Mas has 40,000 employees, an annual converting capacity of 20 million tons, and markets its products in more than 150 countries across 6 continents.
APP operates in Indonesia and China and has branch and sales offices in several countries. APP defines our business as fully integrating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) aspects into all our operations.
We believe that the growth of doing our business responsibly, sustainably, is dependent on the support of the stakeholders and people around us: partners, employees, communities and the general public.
Asia Pulp & Paper implements the HCSA
- Implements the HCSA Toolkit across its plantations and operations to deliver its No Deforestation commitments
- Direct suppliers are required to adopt and implement No Deforestation by applying the HCSA Toolkit across their operations
- Moratorium in place to prevent new developments causing deforestation and implements the HCSA Toolkit to conserve HCS forests
- Monitors its own and its direct suppliers’ compliance with No Deforestation and human rights commitments and provides data to enable the HCSA to monitor its performance
- Commits to establish and implement a United Nations-aligned grievance mechanism accessible to all parties with adjudications made public
- APP and its direct suppliers must comply with international human rights standards of Free, Prior and Informed Consent from Indigenous Peoples and local communities
APP is a member of the HCSA Executive Committee and of several working groups within the HCSA: Protection Working Group, HCSA Quality Assurance Working Group and HCSA Social Requirements Working Group.
In the Protection Working Group, APP contributed to the development of HCSA Integrated Conservation Land Use Plan (ICLUP) guidance, by providing input from the pulpwood industry and based on its own land use planning process known as the Integrated Sustainable Forest Management Plan (ISFMP).
While in the Quality Assurance Working Group, APP participated in the HCSA & HCV-HCSA Valid Assessment as well as HCSA Restoration & Remediation Guidance development. While in the Social Requirements Working Group, APP was involved in the development of HCSA Social Requirements.
In the procurement and manufacturing of pulp and paper products, including paper tissue, packaging, and stationary, APP employs several devices to abide by High Carbon Stock area protection principles which are aligned to APP’s Forest Conservation Policy, Fibre Procurement and Processing Policy and Supplier Evaluation and Risk Assessment (SERA).
Based on global standards for Sustainable Forest Management, SERA evaluates all potential suppliers against 12 indicators where HCS and HCV assessments are part of requirements that must be met.
In September 2017 APP participated in the HCSA Social Requirements (SRs) in South Sumatra, with three overarching goals: to draw lessons from the application of the relevant aspects of SRs, to pilot a methodology being developed to assess the impact of agribusiness operations on welfare, and to introduce SRs to local stakeholders.
Under APP’s Forest Conservation Policy aligned to HCS area protection principles, around 600,000 hectares of forests from Sumatra to Kalimantan have been set aside for conservation, representing more than 20% of the total concession areas managed by the company and its suppliers.
This conservation area is under regular monitoring of not just ground patrols, but also satellite surveillance provided by MDA. This Forest Alert Service uses the spaceborne RADARSAT-2 radar imaging sensor to track disturbances in forest cover and deliver near-real time alerts.
More information about this service can be found on APP’s Sustainability Dashboard.
APP conducted an HCS assessment in 2015 of all of its pulpwood suppliers’ concessions across five regions in Indonesia. The assessment fed into the development of the HCS Toolkit V 1.0. All these assessments were integrated with the HCS result under a process called the Integrated Sustainable Forest Management Plan (ISFMP) development. ISFMP, essentially an integrated land use plan, was developed together with relevant stakeholders including government representatives, local NGOs and community.
The stakeholders were involved in group discussion as well as providing recommendation for the land use plan. ISFMP itself is a living document which will be reviewed regularly, for example to include the recent government regulation regarding peat zoning. The peer review process has generated recommendations, both specific for the HCS peer review process and the more general input for APP operations.
