Empire relocates containerboard project to Ohio

Empire Recycled Fiber has announced it is relocating its recycled containerboard mill from Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, to Dayton, Ohio, after securing a 700,000-square-foot building at a former manufacturing site.

Empire CEO Jim Austin tells Recycling Today the decision to modify its strategy from a greenfield facility to an existing industrial building has substantially reduced the capital cost to execute the project and reduced the timeline for completion by approximately a year.

"We have identified an existing industrial building with all the necessary infrastructure to support process water, electricity, natural gas and WWTP [wastewater treatment plant] capacity," Austin says.

"We are in the process of negotiating the necessary offtake sales contracts to support the financing requirements for the project," he says, adding that he expects the company to meet its financial closing expectations late in the fourth quarter of this year.

The project initially was announced in 2020 as a recycled pulp mill that was to produce 440,000 tons per year before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic forced Empire to adjust its plans. The company, which is based in Springboro, Ohio, then turned its focus to developing a manufacturing facility that will produce approximately 350,000 tons per year of recycled containerboard while consuming 400,000 tons per year of old corrugated containers (OCC) and mixed paper.

According to a June 24 report in Fastmarkets RISI's Pulp & Paper Week, Austin cites new containerboard capacity in the mid-Atlantic region as creating too much competition for OCC tons. Upcoming projects include a Domtar containerboard mill in Kingsport, Tennessee, which is expected to produce 600,000 tons per year and be operational by the end of this year. The facility already has started buying some OCC and other recovered fiber grades, RISI reports. 

Mike Butler, who manages containerboard sales for Domtar, previously told Recycling Today that Domtar is working with International Forest Products, headquartered in Foxborough, Massachusetts, to source furnish for the mill. 

Relocating its project to Dayton, Austin says, puts Empire within a 600-mile radius of 57 percent of the total United States population, creating one of the largest regional supplies of recovered paper, as well as a large regional box market.