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Steam billows from the Woodland Pulp and St. Croix Tissue mills in Baileyville in March 2021. Photo by Fred J. Field.

Woodland Pulp pausing mill operations until end of December

Woodland Pulp announced to its employees on Tuesday that the company will pause manufacturing at its Baileyville pulp mill and wood chip plant from late November to mid-December.

During that month-long hiatus, the company will temporarily lay off 144 employees at both facilities, said Woodland Pulp spokesperson Scott Beal. Woodland Pulp is Washington County’s largest employer, and the layoffs will apply to about one third of the mill workforce. 

In a Wednesday interview with The Maine Monitor, Beal attributed the “extended downtime” to declining prices in the global pulp market, not an additional 10 percent tariff that the Trump administration added to Canadian timber products in mid-October.

“I don't think it's done anything to help,” Beal said of the tariffs, “but the reason for the downtime is driven purely because of the market.”

Poised on the banks of the St. Croix River directly across from Canada, Woodland Pulp is one of Maine’s last major mills. It produces pulp that is then sold to paper makers around the world.

On any given day, Woodland Pulp receives 120 to 140 truckload-equivalents of wood, Beal said, but it stopped accepting new deliveries at the end of October. The company likely won’t begin again for another two months after it processes the materials it has stockpiled. 

The latest tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber imports don’t apply to the unfinished timber that Maine mills source for their pulp and paper products, according to Adam Daigneault, director of the University of Maine’s School of Forest Resources.

However, Daigneault said that broader tariffs on Canadian and European manufacturing equipment may add to the financial difficulties Maine mills are already experiencing from poor pulpwood markets.

“Forest products mills in general have noted that general uncertainty [has] limited their ability for medium and long run planning,” Daigneault said in an email.

In addition to the recent tariff increase, the Trump administration instituted a tariff of up to 35 percent on Canadian softwood lumber imports in August. Officials claim that Canada unfairly subsidizes its timber industry because it charges private logging companies low rates to log Canadian public lands, a dispute that dates back decades.

American trade officials say Canada’s system undercuts timber prices in the U.S. where loggers must pay more competitive prices to harvest from private, state or federal lands.

A logging truck heads toward the mills in Baileyville in this 2021 file photo. The Woodland Pulp and St. Croix Tissue mills employ the largest number of people in Washington County. Photo by Fred J. Field.

The downturn of the global pulp market and the recent tariff hikes are hitting Maine woodlot owners and logging contractors especially hard, said Dana Doran, executive director of the industry group Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast.  

Woodland Pulp is one of six mills in the northeast United States and Quebec that have recently paused or decreased wood deliveries, Doran said. The landowners and contractors his group represents rely on mills for 40 percent of their timber sales and intertwine their success with the success of the mills.

“The tariffs, the uncertainty with markets, pullback on consumption, all of these factors are impacting all of the facilities, including Woodland right now. It’s all kind of a perfect storm,” Doran said. “We hope that they can get through the next two months and start buying wood and moving products again.” 

Doran said that tariffs will only benefit U.S. suppliers if manufacturing increases alongside them. 

The economic output of Maine’s pulp and paper industry declined by $390 million between 2010 and 2022. Both Daigneault and Doran said that further mill closures, even temporary ones, can result in cascading effects on Maine forest management. They change who is trained and employed to work in forestry and disrupt the harvesting regimens Maine forests are currently on.

“Less harvesting of low grade wood can also degrade forest health and the quality of wood that could be harvested in the future,” said Daigneault.

To slow that trend, Doran said there need to be state or federal incentives for American wood manufacturing similar to Canadian subsidies for manufacturing equipment and energy. On their own, tariffs can combine with broader market forces that result in further losses for suppliers and manufacturers. 

“If tariffs are going to occur, you can’t look at it as a one-size-fits-all situation,” Doran said. “The second part is: What’s going to be done to increase U.S. manufacturing? Because if you do one without the other, you’re going to have a negative impact all the way around.”

The Boston Globe is publishing a fantastic series on how the Boston metro area is addressing — or failing to address — coastal flooding and sea-level-rise.

There’s a lot that coastal Maine communities can learn from it and is certainly something I’ll come back to in future reporting.

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