SYLVA–So here it is:
We’re imprinted with this image, those of us who have spent much time around here.
This is Jackson Paper Manufacturing Co., as seen from the intersection of NC 107 and Asheville Highway in Sylva. It’s right up there among the area’s top visual landmarks, along with the view of the courthouse from Main Street and any long panorama of the Great Balsams. To people who have spent decades here, it’s almost invisible, like the last few curves before we reach our own homes.
One of my first memories of this view is clear, though I don’t remember the car I was in, sitting at the intersection. It might’ve been in the Corvair, or the Karman-Ghia. It would’ve been 1970 or ‘71. Regardless, Mead Corporation still operated the plant, employing hundreds of locals but working itself into the cross-hairs of the newly-created Environmental Protection Agency.
Last month, Jackson Paper Manufacturing Co., North Carolina’s largest recycling plant, announced an expansion that will add over 60 full-time jobs. The company makes corrugating medium for cardboard — the zig-zag paper that goes between the two outer layers of liner board to give it rigidity — from 100% recycled cardboard. Jackson Paper says it purchases over 100,000 tons of recycled cardboard each year from recycling centers across the region.
It employs 116 full time employees with an annual payroll of about $6 million.
In its first phase of expansion, Jackson Paper will begin making “complete” cardboard by purchasing liner board material and using its own corrugating medium to make the final product. It will move into and equip the empty Chasam plant on Scotts Creek road for this purpose.
In the long term, Jackson Paper plans to build an additional 139,000-square-foot facility to manufacture its own liner board.
The expansion comes after a year-and-a-half of behind-the-scenes finagling with state and local officials. Sylva Mayor Brenda Oliver played a significant role, and the Jackson County Board of Commissioners went on to lend Jackson Paper a half-million dollars.
And all of this came after an initial plan to locate the expansion at an empty Fruit of the Loom plant in Clayton, GA, fell through when another buyer — a speculator — undercut Jackson Paper’s bid in the last half-hour of bidding. That mill remains empty, and has become the center of controversy that has arisen from Rabun Co., GA’s plans to build a wastewater treatment plant on part of the site and discharge treated wastewater into the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River. (More)
Jackson Paper’s expansion hasn’t been without environmental controversy, either.
When Sylva enacted zoning, almost thirty years ago, the maximum industrial structure height was inadvertently set lower than the existing mill’s height. This was discovered during planning for Jackson Paper’s expansion, and the town of Sylva’s board of commissioners subsequently voted to raise the height limit.
Clean air activist Avram Friedman, Executive Director of the Canary Coalition, took exception, arguing that the zoning height difference was the only leverage the town had to ensure that the plant wouldn’t switch from its current wood chip fuel source to coal or rubber pellets — sources that its current air quality permit would allow, and that might seriously impact the town.
Friedman further contended that the town gave improper public notice of its intention to change the zoning regulations, and asked the town board to rescind its decision.
Friedman’s request died for lack of support, but board member Sarah Graham (disclosure: she’s my wife) moved that Jackson Paper be invited to answer community questions in open forum. That motion passed 3-2. Friedman was dismissive of the idea, calling it “meaningless”, but Jackson Paper hasn’t been eager to act on it either, perhaps validating the Canary Coalition’s concern.
The plant, as it now exists, more or less, began when George H. Mead opened Sylva Paperboard Co. in 1928. A tannery had been there since 1901, and the tannery, which used wood chips to fire its boiler, had more wood chips than it could use. Up north, Mead had discovered a way to make cardboard from wood chips, so he was invited to buy into the tannery operation.
The tannery faded away by mid-century, but by then Mead was the county’s largest manufacturer. This was time when many small mountain towns were centered around major manufacturers, and Mead’s impact was huge. It bought over $1 million in local timber a year, employed over 300 workers, and had a payroll of $1.3 million. Mead owned 40,000 acres of timberland.
But there was a downside. Here’s what Dr. John Bell wrote in the “History of Jackson County”:
… Mead experienced financial trouble because of environmental problems. The manufacturing process produced a by-product of “black liquor” that was discharged into Scotts Creek … In 1937 Mead noted the harmful effects of this liquor on water quality and aquatic life and started treating it. Mead also built a pilot plant in 1950 to remove the solid waste from the liquor, but the discharge still had a dark color and bad odor.
In 1957, Swain County, which is downstream, began making noise that Mead needed to clean up its act, and eventually the state told Mead it had until 1962 to do just that.
Mead got deadline extensions and invested over $2.5 million dollars in new discharge technology, but discovered that while that technology cleaned the water significantly, it simultaneously created very bad air pollution.
Environmentalist and iconoclast Edward Abbey wrote this about Sylva in 1969, after a short stint on the faculty at Western Carolina University:
Sylva must have once been a lovely town. Small, with a population of perhaps five thousand, nestled in the green hills below the Great Smokies, full of beautiful old houses, laved as they say by the sparkling waters of the Tuckasegee River (sic), with the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat, Sylva must have been beautiful. Now it is something else, for the streets are grimy and noisy, jammed always with motor traffic, the river is a sewer, and the sky a pall of poisonous filth. The obvious villain in the picture is the local Mead’s Paper Mill, busily pumping its garbage into the air and the into the river, but general traffic and growth must bear the rest of the blame.
The EPA, founded during the Nixon administration, soon told Mead to clean the air. Mead decided to cut its losses, closed the Sylva operation in 1974 and moved to Alabama.
The facility remained idle until 1978, when Dixie Container Company purchased the mill and converted it to the production of 100% recycled medium. The plant has changed hands twice since that time, but remains North Carolina’s largest recycling facility, with a “closed loop” system that releases no water, and woodchip-fired boilers that release very little ash into the air.
