05/29/2026
A Wake-Up Call for Rural America: The Silent Collapse of the U.S. Pulp and Paper Industry from Joseph Parnell.
I just returned from the National Forest Resources Association annual meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. It was a remarkable gathering — exceptional speakers, candid conversations in the hallways, and the kind of straight talk that only happens when people who work in an industry get together in one room.
On the seven-plus-hour drive home, my mind wouldn't stop. Everything I had heard kept connecting — to the news, to the markets, to what I see happening in rural communities across this country. When I got back to the office, I dug deep into the research. What I found confirmed my worst fears.
We have a crisis on our hands, and most of America has no idea it's happening.
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The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
According to a speaker from Forisk, a leading forest industry research firm, 29 pulp and paper mills have closed across the United States since 2019. Twenty-nine. Each one of those closures represents a community — a small town where the mill was often the single largest employer, the anchor of the local tax base, and the reason the hardware store, the diner, and the school stayed open.
The direct job losses from those closures are estimated at up to 20,000 positions. But when you factor in the indirect and induced jobs — the loggers, the truckers, the equipment suppliers, the small businesses that depended on mill workers spending their paychecks locally — the total economic impact could approach 100,000 jobs lost. These are not coastal knowledge-economy jobs. These are good-paying, blue-collar jobs in rural America. They are irreplaceable in the communities that lose them.
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Why Are the Mills Closing?
The story is more complicated than simple market decline — and that complexity is exactly what makes it so dangerous.
Part of the problem is real. Demand for certain paper grades — newsprint, printing and writing paper — has declined as the world went digital. U.S. mills that were built around those grades have struggled to adapt. Many of our facilities are aging, and the capital investment required to modernize them is enormous.
But here is what is critically important to understand: the global paper market is not shrinking. Worldwide paper markets are growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 3.8%, driven by explosive demand for packaging, e-commerce shipping materials, and paper-based alternatives to single-use plastics. The opportunity is there. The question is who captures it.
The answer, increasingly, is not us.
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The World Built New Mills. We Closed Old Ones.
While the United States was shuttering facilities, South America and Asia were building the next generation of paper mills — and the gap in competitiveness is staggering. New mills in Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, and China are ultramodern, highly automated, and engineered for the growing grades. They require a fraction of the energy and a fraction of the workforce that aging U.S. facilities need to produce the same ton of paper.
Meanwhile, U.S. mill owners have faced an additional headwind that their foreign competitors do not: an ever-shifting regulatory environment. Changing EPA policies have created enough uncertainty that many owners have simply stopped investing. Why would they spend hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading a facility when the regulatory goalposts may move before the ink is dry on the permits?
The result is predictable. As of 2024, the United States was the single largest importer of paper in the entire world, spending a staggering $20.8 billion on imported paper. A country that was once the undisputed global leader in paper production is now the world's biggest buyer of someone else's product.
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The China Problem — and Why It Should Sound Familiar
Here is where the alarm bells should be deafening.
China currently has excess papermaking capacity roughly equal to the entire annual paper consumption of the U.S. market. That surplus production isn't sitting idle — it is being directed at global export markets, driving down prices and displacing domestic producers across North America, Europe, and Latin America.
How is China sustaining production at a scale that defies basic economics? The same way it did in steel. The Chinese government subsidizes its paper industry — not to make money, but to keep people employed, dominate supply chains, and systematically outlast the competition. Mills run at 60–70% utilization rates that would trigger immediate shutdowns in any Western market. They absorb losses that private companies in a free market simply cannot survive. They do it long enough, and consistently enough, that competitors close — exactly as we have seen with 29 U.S. mills since 2019.
Then, when the competition is gone, they control the market.
We watched this happen in steel. We are watching it happen in real time in pulp and paper. The parallel is not a coincidence — it is a playbook.
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What Is at Stake
This is not just an industry problem. It is a rural America problem. It is an environmental problem. And it is a national security problem.
The forests that feed our paper mills don't just produce fiber — they produce clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat, and carbon storage for every American. Working forests are actively managed forests. When the economic incentive to manage them disappears — when there is no mill left to buy the timber — those forests don't get managed. They get fragmented, developed, or left to accumulate fuel loads that drive catastrophic wildfire. The collapse of the pulp and paper industry is not just an economic loss. It is an environmental loss that will be felt for generations.
The communities that surround these mills — across the Southeast, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, and New England — have already begun to feel the devastation. When a mill closes, it isn't just the 500 or 700 mill workers who suffer. It affects every business, school, and local government that depended on that mill's economic gravity.
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It Is Time for Our Government to Act
The U.S. government has shown it will defend strategic industries, including semiconductors,pharmaceuticals, and, more recently, steel.
The pulp and paper industry — which supports rural jobs, sustains working forests, and underpins supply chains for e-commerce, food packaging, and consumer goods — deserves the same attention.
That means enforcing trade laws against subsidized foreign competition, creating regulatory stability so mill owners can invest with confidence, and supporting the conversion of aging mills to the packaging and recycled-fiber grades that growing markets demand. Losing this industry is not just an economic statistic; it is the hollowing out of rural America, one mill town at a time.
The meeting in Charleston left me energized by the people in this industry — their knowledge, passion, and commitment to the land and communities they serve. But it also left me with a deep sense of urgency.
The window to act is closing. Twenty-nine mills are already gone. The question is how many more we will lose before we decide this industry is worth fighting for.
Joseph Parnell
