Green politics and new industrial opportunities: the Aquitaine paper industry and biomass cogeneration

As the European forest industry takes up the challenge of certification, it is also called upon to develop a strategy which mitigates the effects of climate change. From the latter perspective, the forest industry is solicited to pursue the carbon neutrality of its activity (through the Exchange Trade System). Today, public policies have thus led the forestry industry to develop green energy by biomass cogeneration. Cogeneration is the simultaneous production of electricity and heat, both of which are used in paper-making. The aim of policy is to extend such production of electricity to cover domestic consumption. Such a path makes the forest and paper industries go deeper in the sustainability of their activities but it also makes them develop new strategies. From the point of view of political science, this new policy and industrial orientation can be best examined through analyzing the making and implementing of the territorial environmental strategies that cover both certification and forestry programs. In industrial terms, such a strategy not only challenges current practices of local resources provision and the valorisation of wood wastes, but more fundamentally still it constitutes the development of a new path, a new market and new constraints (in terms of norms and competition). The aim of our proposal is to highlight the displacements of regulatory decision-making between superior levels (top-down logic) and the political work undertaken by political enterprises on the ground (bottom-up logic). At the same time, analysis will encompass the normative environment and the convergence of green politics with competitive opportunities in the forest-wood-paper system. The paper will explore these political, normative and industrial issues linked to the new energy strategy through local case studies of globalized paper mills (Smurfit-Kappa, Tembec, Gascogne paper), located in Europe's largest human-made forest (the Landes de Gascogne), which began to go down this path in 2008