Based in Brussels, the Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) is a non-profit organization that groups the European pulp and paper industry and streamlines its achievements and its products’ benefits. Using the CEPI platform, the paper industry increases its visibility and acts on emerging challenges, making contributions on behalf of the industry. The 800 enterprises which are members of CEPI represent 26% of world paper products production (CEPI, 2011b).

The key initiative of the CEPI is the “Unfold the future – 2050 roadmap to a low-carbon bio-economy” for the Forest Fibre Industry which was jointly developed by representatives from pulp and paper enterprises and national associations. This roadmap will be incorporated in the European Commission’s “Roadmap for moving to a competitive low-carbon economy in 2050”. The CEPI’s roadmap maintains that it is possible to reduce the CO2 emissions from the European pulp and paper industry by 50 to 60% by 2050 by applying the right policies and best available and emerging technologies. The roadmap argues that if a system based on biological resource supply and renewable raw materials can be developed, bio-economy could become the single driver of the global economy. The roadmap estimates that reducing CO2 by 80% by 2050 is equivalent to lowering the emissions from 60 Mt CO2 in 1990 to 12 Mt CO2 in 2050. This reduction includes 40 Mt of direct CO2 emissions and the rest are indirect emissions due to electricity and transportation (CEPI, 2011a). The roadmap recognizes the need for applying unconventional, breakthrough technologies throughout the pulp and paper industry in order to achieve an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. In order to accelarate innovation for these breakthrough technologies, CEPI has recently launched the so called "Two Team Project", where two teams of industry experts are competing each other to identify breakthrough technologies. The project is also open to ideas from all over the world. Individuals and organizationa with relevant ideas can submit their ideas to the team through the project's web-site: http://unfoldthefuture.eu/. 

The roadmap also calls the European policymakers for initiating sector-specific industrial policy packages, for fulfilling the potential of EU – Emissions Trading Scheme so that it may become an innovation mechanism, for initiating transformation partnership with EU, individual member states, pulp and paper industry and suppliers and for broadening the climate change perspective to initiate a system shift towards bio-economy (CEPI, 2011a).

CEPI published “Renewable Raw Materials vs. Renewable Energy” in 2003. The paper briefly describes the achievements of the European pulp and paper industry in adopting renewable sources for raw materials and energy. The paper underlines that approximately 50% of the fuels used by the pulp and paper industry are based on biofuels (including black liquor, forest residues and fibre sludges). It also reports on the importance of the role of biomass in achieving the ambitious EU target of a 12% share of renewable energy sources (RES) in gross EU energy production by 2010 (CEPI, 2011c).

One initiative “Declaration of intent on Renewable Energy Resources” taken by the European pulp and paper industry aims to make voluntary contributions towards RES by increasing the amount of biomass used in the industry for on-site heat and electrical power production by 25% on average by 2010 compared to 2001 (CEPI, 2011d).

The paper “The European Paper Industry's Views and Action Plan on the Climate Change Challenge” published in 2003 highlights the achievements of the European pulp and paper industry in energy and emissions savings. It regards the European pulp and paper industry as energy-efficient since the industry’s specific primary energy consumption decreased by 10% in the period 1990-2002 and the specific CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use decreased by 25% between 1990 and 2002 chiefly due to increased energy efficiency and the widespread use of biomass. The following voluntary actions by the European pulp and paper industry have also been reported (CEPI, 2011e);

• The industry aims to encourage and monitor the consistent and accurate collection of greenhouse gas emission data worldwide. Data collection will be based on the methods developed by the World Resource Institute (WRI) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
• The industry commits to reporting the CO2 emissions of the pulp and paper industry on a regular basis in an unambiguous and accurate manner from 2005.
• The industry aims to increase the proportion of biomass from 49% to 56% by 2010 in its on-site total primary energy consumption.

The “Sustainability Report” of 2011 describes the resource efficiency and the records of the European paper and pulp industry in terms of energy and emissions savings. It states that from 1990 to 2010, the electricity and primary energy consumption of the European pulp and paper fell by 14%. The paper also mentions that, under the European Commission’s Strategic Energy Technology (SET) plan, the paper and pulp industry is launching a European Industrial Initiative to research and develop new technologies and process to improve the industry’s energy efficiency (CEPI, 2011f).

CEPI has published an issue sheet on bio-energy. It regards bio-energy as essential to the EU achieving its GHG emissions reduction target of 8% (CEPI, 2011g). CEPI’s “Recycling” issue sheet reports that the European pulp and paper industry has reached recycling levels of up to 66% (CEPI, 2011h).