re: International Pacific Closing N. LA Mill

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how can you be this dumb

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He's a Democrat, so...

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Thank you for the info. A coworker of mine checked with them and was told they are not hiring Millwright personnel at the moment.

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Are you open to moving? GP in Zachary may be hiring.

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IP Mansfield is currently 50 million in the hole due to some major recent issues.
That’s IP’s baby and they obviously are willing to invest in it.

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Usually containerboard mills are safer, but that's not the case anymore. Why is there too much domestic containerboard capacity with all of this ecommerce business in the past 20 years? Are we importing more containerboard?

IP shut down Courtland around 2014 or so. It was devastating to that area. Camden Arkansas had the same issue when IP shut that one down in 2001 and eliminated all 600 jobs there - that town is a shell of its former self despite having massive defense related employers nearby. I don't even think they still have two high schools in the area. It is an incredibly depressing part of Arkansas.

Campti is a huge plant in a fairly rural area - people will feel this unfortunately, and many of them will have to relocate. Some will have to be retrained, which is frustrating for people who are in the latter stages of their career.

And unfortunately, Louisiana hasn't figured out how to draw additional employers to that area in the past 30 years. The major road network is still not well developed; the local public schools are not great, and the nearest "major" towns are also stagnant or declining (Alexandria and Shreveport). There aren't auto plants or steel mills around for people to shift to. I like that we have a battery processing plant in Vidalia, but that's kind of a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what that area needs.

I'm afraid Bogalosa's paper mill is not long for this world either, although it may hum along for another 10 years since they have invested in it recently.

If your community is reliant on forestry products, I hope it's building materials, fluff pulp, or tissue/towels. The demand for it remains mostly static.

Unfortunately the days when there were papermills in every other county/parish are gone. They are closing down just like the textile mills that disappeared in the 1970s-1990s and the bottling plants that disappeared in the 1950s-1970s. This is just another nail in the coffin for rural America as jobs either get oursourced to foreign countries or move to larger metro areas.

Pine trees (and hdwd pulpwood)get closer to worthless by the day.

IP NTZ closing was a big one.

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Trump’s America. And I mean that seriously

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Yeah, that’s the part

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Why is there too much domestic containerboard capacity with all of this ecommerce business in the past 20 years?

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Because the capacity shifted over from newsprint. Think about the size and weight of the daily paper you used to get at home in the 1980s. Now think of that X 100 million of those papers every day. That market has basically gone to zero.

The other big loser product has been uncoated freesheet (copy paper). No one prints things out anymore.

So a lot of those mills jumped over into containerboard and over produced the commodity despite the growing demand.

The other issue is basically just the age of the facilities. They build 3 or 4 brand new paper mills every year in various places around the world. The last one built in the US was Alabama River in -- I believe -- 1985.

It's just a declining industry.