New Owner of Former Biron Plant Intends to Run Paper Mill

According to a news report published this week by the Daily Tribune, Wausau, Wis., USA, if the sale of NewPage Paper Corp.’s Biron paper mill goes through, it will be the first time in 120 years that the facility is operated by a company that doesn’t also own the paper mills in Wisconsin Rapids, Stevens Point, and the research and development facility in Biron.

 

Catalyst Paper Holdings Inc., a Richmond, B.C., Canada-based corporation, recently announced it would buy two of NewPage’s mills, one in Biron and one in Rumford, Maine, for a total of $74 million.

 

The sale of the mill was done in an effort to expedite the Department of Justice’s approval of NewPage’s merger with Verso Paper Corp., NewPage spokesman, Phil Hartley, told Gannett Wisconsin Media. However, if U.S. regulators reject the acquisition, NewPage will retain ownership of the Biron mill.

 

The new Canadian company intends to run the mill, which employs about 400 people, as it always has operated, according to the newspaper article.

 

Still, the purchase of the mill represents a significant change for the facility and its employees, as it and the other three NewPage facilities always have been connected by a parent company.

 

Of NewPage’s four Wisconsin facilities, Biron is the oldest, having opened in 1873 as a sawmill. In 1892, the facility began producing paper as Grand Rapids Pulp & Paper Co., and, to this day, it continues to turn out 370,000 tpy of coated groundwood paper, according to NewPage’s website.

 

In 1894, the Biron paper mill was incorporated into the Consolidated Water Power and Paper Co., which later bought the mill in 1911. By 1918, the Wisconsin Rapids and Stevens Point operations came into existence under Consolidated Paper. And later, in 1959, the research and development facility opened in Biron. All four facilities claimed Consolidated Paper as their parent until 2000, when it was purchased by Helsinki-based Stora Enso. In 2007, Stora Enso sold its North American division, including all of its Wisconsin paper facilities, to NewPage Corp., based in Ohio.

 

For the past 120 years, the four paper operations were akin to siblings. Although the new millennium brought new owners for the paper facilities, the four different operations still all "were along for the ride," said Jeff Landin, president of the Wisconsin Paper Council.

 

But even though the Biron mill is leaving the pack, NewPage spokesman Phil Hartley said there will still be collaboration between Biron mill and Wisconsin Rapids, as they are only four miles apart. "They’re intertwined," Hartley said. "And they’ll stay intertwined."

 

Currently, the Biron mill receives pulp from NewPage’s Wisconsin Rapids facility and uses the Wisconsin Rapids mill’s wastewater treatment facility. NewPage is working to keep these operational relationships between the two mills alive, Hartley said. "In many ways, the two facilities will still be together," Hartley noted. "I don’t see it ever being totally separated, ever."