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Commitment 11: Plant two million trees on behalf of our customers
What’s the issue?
Trees play a critical role in managing climate change by capturing and storing climate warming greenhouse gases. However, in Australia, we are losing trees at an alarming rate, and in some regions, up to 85 per cent of the natural landscape has been lost. Not only is this concerning when it comes to climate change, but it also means that native wildlife is being significantly impacted by habitat loss.
What are we doing?
We have a big goal, to plant two million trees by 2025 with the help of our customers and planting partner, Greening Australia. We are on track to achieve this through our ongoing initiative, Restoring Australia, in which we plant two trees for every one used, based on the weight of paper products purchased by our customers. Through the initiative, we are working with Greening Australia to restore 2,500 hectares of land to improve and protect natural habitats for Australia's native wildlife and threatened and endangered species.
Since the program's launch in 2017, a total of 794,000 trees have been planted and 1,500 hectares of land has been restored. Once these trees reach maturity, the positive collective impact of these new trees is the equivalent of taking more than 185,000 cars off the road for a year.
The program now has 18 planting sites across Australia and these efforts are already seeing wildlife return to their natural areas. A recent sighting of the very rare and nationally endangered Australian Painted Snipe at our wetland restoration site at Mungalla Station, Queensland, is just one example of the impact that this restoration work is having.
Focus for FY2022
During FY2022, we expect to plant close to 250,000 trees and will reach a key milestone of one million trees planted. We will continue to help our customers shop sustainably, by encouraging them to purchase their paper products at Officeworks and in doing so, contributing to Restoring Australia.
