Catalyst Paper Wins Top Industry Award For Eleventh Consecutive Year

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): Catalyst Paper Corporation has announced that it has been selected as one of the Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada by the Corporate Knights Magazine. This is the 11^th consecutive year that the company has won the top industry honor. The company won an overall score of 43.1% and was ranked 39 in the list.

Graham Kissack, Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility at Catalyst Paper stated that the company is proud to be acknowledged for the 11^th consecutive year as one of Canada’s Best Corporate Citizen. The company has been successful in winning confidence of leading brands in its growing line of paper and packaging products, mainly on account of its highest level of sustainability practices, Kissack noted. The award is in recognition of Catalyst’s recent efforts to strengthen its leadership role in sustainable business practices and to build constructive relationships with various stakeholders, he added.

Corporate Knights had been selecting winning companies on the basis of their performance against 12 key performance indicators for a number of years. Additional metrics were not adopted on account of failure of many companies in providing valid data on new metrics. With sustainable disclosure practices displaying growth, even though in a slow pace, Corporate Knights was able to add two new metrics to the ranking methodology this year-supplier score and the clean air productivity score. The other normal sustainability indicators include greenhouse gas productivity, taxes paid, leadership diversity, pension fund status, safety, fatality, injury rate etc.,

The company demonstrated several commitments to sustainability during 2016. For instance, a steam-generating boiler was shut down at its Biron mill during the month of May last year, thereby eliminating the use of high-sulphur coal and significantly reducing emissions. It implemented energy management improvements, as a result of which particulate fell by 68%, sulphur dioxide by 56%, nitrous oxide by 44% and other greenhouse gases were reduced by 23%. The large emissions improvement at Biron resulted in 4% decline in corporate-wide greenhouse gas emissions on both an absolute and intensity basis.

Catalyst Paper’s focus on continuous improvement resulted in significant reduction in frequency of safety incidents, resulting in lost time from work, as well as measures relating to injury severity. There were significant reductions in total medical incident frequency at Biron, Crofton, Powell River and the Surrey Distribution Center. The company implemented a two-part company-wide safety strategy. All mills had analyzed their safety statistics to identify and prioritize injury types and causes. Specific initiatives such as corporate-wide glove policy contributed to significant reduction of common injury types. Also, the company’s severity rate has shown consistent improvement since 2012.

About Catalyst Paper

Catalyst Paper Corporation is a pulp and paper company based in the Canadian city of Richmond, British Columbia. It operates five pulp mills and paper mills, producing a combined 1.8 tonnes of paper and 500,000 tonnes of market pulp annually. Catalyst Paper manufactures diverse printing papers such as coated freesheet, C1S, coated and uncoated groundwood, newsprint, directory, as well as market pulp. Customers include retailers, publishers and commercial printers in North America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim and Europe.