Global paper consumption in a product life cycle perspective

A country’s paper consumption is depending on the country’s GDP, and so is the “Environmental Performance Index”, EPI, produces at Yale Center of Environmental Law and Policy, Yale University. When paper consumption and EPI is plot together as a function of GDP the connection is obvious. The plot is done for the 96 countries where Stora Enso has a sales office and where data is available, leaving 30 countries out.

But just as any product the paper consumption should grow through all the different stages in the product lifecycle curve. When plot the top thirteen paper consumption countries the trend id clear.

According to the plot of paper consumption in the top thirteen countries in the interval of 1961 to 2005 there is a trend of decreasing paper consumption after the year 2000. The top thirteen paper consumption average below clearly shows what is happening. The average GDP increases constantly even though we earlier showed the linkage between GDP and paper consumption. It there for seems like the different markets don’t just get full, they tend to shrimp.

The thesis of paper consumption following the stages of the product life cycle curve seems to be useful in order to measure how a curtain market is affected by climate change. Because a market’s fullness in combination with how it is performing environmentally and the customer’s climate confidence could be a way of evaluating the climate change affection a certain market.

If the idealized product life cycle curve shown above is used to plot all the different sales offices according to the last twenty years paper consumption a clear view of the market situation in terms of product life cycle is reveled.

In order to plot the different countries/markets indexes has been used. Countries above the “idealized life line” have higher paper consumption per GDP than average, and those below the line therefore have lower paper consumption per GDP than average. Countries with the lowest GDP are generally found in the developing phase.