Going Green with Project UP™

At Boise Paper, community service is a huge part of our Paper with Purpose® promise. One way that we strive to fulfill this promise is by regularly lending our hands to service projects in the communities we work in, as well as those across the country that our customers call home. Recently, we traveled to Cleveland and Philadelphia with the Arbor Day Foundation as part of our Project UP™ program, which works to transform distressed urban spaces in to vibrant community places.

Adding Trees to Cleveland

Our first fall Project UP event took place in September at E-Prep and Village Prep Woodland Hills in Cleveland. Along with volunteers from Avery Dennison, Western Reserve Land Conservancy and the Arbor Day Foundation, we spent the morning planting 30 trees in Cleveland’s Union Miles neighborhood. Tree canopy cover in Cleveland is low at just 19 percent, and an estimated 100 acres of tree canopy is lost each year, so our event helped restore some of the canopy cover and assisted the efforts of the Cleveland Tree Coalition to plant and maintain thousands of trees in city neighborhoods.

Project-UP-Philadelphia

Next, we headed to Philadelphia in October to revitalize Bartram High School, Tilden Middle School and Bartram’s Garden – the oldest botanic garden in North America. We teamed up with Office Depot and the Arbor Day Foundation to plant over 50 fruit trees, 80 berry bushes and fruiting vines, and hundreds of perennial flowers and herbs. Through our efforts, we increased access to fresh fruit and expanded opportunities for nature and nutrition education among the youth in low-resourced communities while providing a wide range of environmental benefits to the area.

We were honored to be a part of these two events in Cleveland and Philadelphia and are already looking forward to our next Project UP events!