In 1990, a year when the American appetite for industrial resources was fixed in the direction of the Persian Gulf, a woman named Cheung Yan moved from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. Cheung was born in 1957 in northern China. She came to Hong Kong by way of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, the country’s first “special economic zone”—an early laboratory in the Chinese capitalist experiment. Cheung worked there as an accountant; after she’d saved some money, she formed a business in Hong Kong, with two partners, to ship wastepaper within China. She was encouraged by an older acquaintance who worked at a paper mill in the north. “Wastepaper,” he told her, “is a forest.” Cheung would relate that story in profiles in both the New York Times and the New Yorker, published in 2007 and 2009, respectively—not long after that the success of her friend’s advice had turned Cheung into the world’s richest woman.
That’s one weird effect of the new transnational wastepaper trade: the constant demand for paper in China has reduced the availability of wastepaper domestically, driving up prices for mills that process recycled paper. The way that paper is consumed has upended, too. In the United States, the print media simply print less—consumption of newsprint and office paper has dropped over the past decade. In China it’s risen. Two mills in the midwest that used to subsist on newsprint no longer do. It’s a nebulous market.
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Some mills are closing. Blue Heron Paper, in Oregon, shuttered in 2011, though not before trying to face bankruptcy by cutting its newsprint line in favor of “a new product line of environmentally friendly commercial toweling grades.” Grays Harbor mill, in Hoquiam, Washington, closed in 2011 and will soon reopen under new ownership. At the end of September Catalyst Paper will close its recycling mill in Snowflake, Arizona. Manistique Papers, the mill Johnson oversees, almost went out of business too.
Manistique is close to water and timber resources, and accessible by rail from Minneapolis—notable characteristics when, in the early 1900s, the publisher of the Minneapolis Tribune, W.J. Murphy, was looking for a newsprint supplier and decided to build one there. Construction finished on Manistique Pulp and Paper Company in 1920, and the mill continued to produce newsprint for most of the 20th century, switching briefly in the 1940s to supply corrugated cardboard for the World War II effort. The mill changed hands a couple of times over the next few decades, and in 1959 it was sold to Field Enterprises, which published the Sun-Times and the Daily News. In 1981 Marshall Field V took full ownership of the plant, which he renamed Manistique Papers Inc.
In 1996 Greg Rudder, who edits the trade journal Pulp & Paper Weekly, heard from a contact in the Bay Area. Rudder told me in an e-mail that the source reported that “he had been in China, seen the industry development . . . and believed that their mantra was to ‘rule the world’ in pulp and paper production.” Rudder says that his contact, and others he spoke with, believe China’s demand for wastepaper “would someday challenge the ability of U.S. mills to easily buy recycled paper.” The founder of a Vancouver-based recycling company said that the number of calls she received from buyers interested in mixed wastepaper “increased exponentially” in the late 90s, several years after Cheung Yan and her husband had started their wastepaper-export business.
The U.S. had about 750 industrial paper-making machines in 2000, Rudder says; today there are about 340. Prior to 2001, Canada was the largest export market for wastepaper from the U.S. That market is now, far and away, China. The United States is China’s chief supplier.
When I visited the FutureMark plant, near 131st and Pulaski, I found that everybody I spoke with knew my uncle, who’s worked for as long as I can remember at the Manistique mill. On a tour of the plant I ran into my childhood next-door neighbor, who lives now in the Chicago area but still works for Manistique Papers. Before it came under possession of Watermill, FutureMark was owned by a Finnish firm, Myllykoski, which in the early 2000s made expensive upgrades to the facility that gave it greater capacity to produce a higher-quality paper than newsprint. Matt Nightingale, who handles procurement for FutureMark and now for Manistique Papers, characterized the market then: “Wastepaper was plentiful, and it was cheap. My guess is that [Myllykoski] looked at it and said, ‘Listen, we can get very inexpensive fiber. And we can upgrade the paper from newsprint to a higher-value grade. We can make a really good turn on investment.’”
