| Summary: | China has been the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper products. In the context of the “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals”, China’s papermaking industry which is traditionally a high energy-consuming and high-emissions industry, desperately needs a nationally appropriate low-carbon development path. From the consumption-side perspective, this paper calculates the CO<sub>2</sub> emissions of China’s papermaking industry from 2000 to 2019 by using carbon emission nuclear algorithm, grain-straw ratio, first-order attenuation method, and STIRFDT decomposition model, etc., to further explore the core stages and basic patterns affecting the industry’s carbon peaking. The results show that the total CO<sub>2</sub> emissions of China’s papermaking industry showed an upward trend from 2000–2013, stable from 2013–2017, and a steady but slight decline from 2017–2019. Meanwhile, the total CO<sub>2</sub> emissions of the full life cycle of paper products in China have decreased to a certain extent in the raw material acquisition, pulp, and paper making and shipping stages, with only the waste paper disposal stage showing a particular upward trend. We find that from 2000 to 2019, China’s CO<sub>2</sub> emissions in the pulping and papermaking stage of paper products accounted for 68% of the total emissions in the whole life cycle, of which 59% was caused by coal consumption. Moreover, the scenario prediction shows that improving the energy structure and increasing the waste paper recovery rate can reduce the CO<sub>2</sub> emissions of the industry, and it is more significant when both work. Based on this and the four core stages of CO<sub>2</sub> emissions of the papermaking industry we proposed ways to promote CO<sub>2</sub> emissions peaking of China’s paper products.
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