The Final Word by Jim Thompson


We have seen this movie before. NewPage’s bankruptcy will bring all sorts of “smart” brains out of the woodwork, both from industry and political entities, with ways to save each facility and collectively save them all.

The reality is simply this: we do not use as much of these kinds of paper(s) as we did in the past. An excellent example: United Airlines just bought 11,000 iPads to give to their cockpit crews to make cockpits paperless.

As bad as communities want to save these jobs, as nice (or not) as the facilities have been maintained, they will not all survive. There is no panacea. The world is moving on to another phase.

This is not to say we don’t have a great industry — we do — as long as you are manufacturing products which exploit the chemical or material aspects of cellulose. For printing and writing uses, the only question is the slope of the downward curve.