Tropical Pulp Still a Long Way From Fiction in German Children's Books: German book publishers have only marginally improved performance in excluding paper pulp sourced through destruction of tropical forests that are home to critically endangered elephants, tigers and orang-utans. A WWF-Germany survey of children's books found about 30 per cent of books contained significant amounts of mixed tropical hardwood fibres characteristic of natural forest destruction. A 2009 children's book survey found mixed tropical hardwood fibres in 40% of German children's books from one third of the publishing houses sampled. WWF attributes the low rate of improvement to increased production of books in China and large scale sourcing of pulp from deforestation in Indonesia and other tropical forest countries. Indonesia's largest pulp and paper company, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), linked with its suppliers to the destruction of more than 2 million hectares of tropical forest in Sumatra, directly operates 20 pulp and paper mills in China with an annual production of eight million tonnes.
