Resurrected East Millinocket Mill Featured in Boston Globe Article
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Earlier this week, the Boston Globe ran a feature article on current operations and outlook for the East Millinocket, Maine, USA, mill that was acquired by New Hampshire-based Cate Street Capital in August 2011, along with its sister mill in nearby Millinocket, Maine. Only two months after acquiring the two shuttered Katahdin paper mills through its resurrected subsidiary Great Northern Paper (GNP), Cate Street Capital restarted East Millinocket (which had been closed since April 2011), putting 225 employees back to work and re-launching the historic Great Northern Paper brand. The printing and writing papers mill launched an aggressive sales and marketing campaign and quickly built a 35-40 day backlog of orders and were sold out entering 2013.
The company has been restructuring the Millinocket site (which shutdown in September 2008) into a torrefied wood production facility that will startup this year as Thermogen Industries LLC. The plant will hire 25 full-time employees and produce 110,000 tons of torrefied wood per year for overseas, coal-fired power plants that will reduce dangerous emissions by adding torrefied wood to their fuel mix.
The East Millinocket mill has now started both paper machines. Some of the product line at East Millinocket includes newsprint, directory paper, and Baxter Brite used for inserts, flyers, books, and financial publications. The mill was recently in the news for producing more than 3,000 tons of paper for the popular Fifty Shades trilogy of books on its Baxter Brite grade. GNP's responsiveness, service, and the paper's consistent performance made Baxter Brite a reliable choice for Fifty Shades paper merchant Midland Paper and the books' publisher, Vintage, an imprint of Random House, Inc.
Today, as the Boston Globe articles describes, the mill is continuing to perform well but there are growing concerns within the East Millinocket community over finding and training younger replacements for many of the retirement-age employees who formerly worked at the mill before it went down under continuing growth of digital communications and a declining demand for P&W papers. There is also concern about the mill's reduced tax structure and the need for more city and county revenues to keep schools, parks, and roads repaired and in decent operating condition.
The full Boston Globe article is available online.
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