St. Paul recycled paper mill to close, affecting nearly 190 workers
The owner of a longtime St. Paul mill that produces coated recycled board for use in product packaging says it’s permanently closing the facility later this year.
Smurfit Westrock said nearly 190 employees will lose their jobs when the mill along Wabash Avenue, just north of Interstate 94 at Vandalia Street, closes around the end of June.
The company is also closing a mill in Texas and is moving to close two facilities in Germany.
“While closing facilities is never an easy decision, it is based on a realistic expectation of current and future capacity needs, operating costs and an unrelenting focus on improving our business,” Tony Smurfit, president and group CEO of Smurfit Westrock, said in a news release. “We are very grateful for the significant contributions made by the teams at these locations over the years and we will do all we can to support them throughout this process.”
The company said it “will provide support to employees during this transition including career transition assistance and relocation opportunities where possible.”
The St. Paul mill dates back more than a century. According to records from the Minnesota Historical Society, for much of that time it was known as the Waldorf Paper Products Co. It went through a series or mergers, sales and buyouts, and in the early 1990s employed more than 2,000 people.
The company was sold to RockTenn in the late 1990s, then became Westrock, and finally became Smurfit Westrock through a merger completed last year.
In 2007, MPR News reported that the mill accounted for half of the paper recycled in Minnesota.
But the workforce at the St. Paul mill had slowly decreased in size over the years. In 2022, the company — then Westrock — laid off about 130 people when it stopped producing corrugated paper at that facility.
