DS Smith, the leading provider of sustainable packaging solutions, today announced an ambitious upgrade program to its kraft paper mill in Viana, Portugal. A multiyear €145M package of investments will bring some of the most up to date paper-making machinery to Viana, rebuilding the mills paper machine and reducing CO2 emissions. Marking the company’s commitment to both growth and the circular economy in Portugal, the investment package will include the rebuild of the existing paper machine and a brand-new state of the art recovery boiler which will be one of the most modern in Europe. The boiler will improve environmental performance by enhancing steam efficiency at the mill by 25%, with steam from the boiler being recycled back into the mill. The start-up of the new boiler, provided by market leader Valmet, is expected to be in early 2025.

Construction is scheduled to begin soon on a $91 million upgrade at Georgia-Pacific’s containerboard mill in Monticello, Mississippi. It's one of the company’s largest investments in the Lawrence County facility. The project consists of replacing the log line, which includes scales, cranes, a rechipper, unbinding racks and other critical equipment needed to safely unload trucks and prepare logs and chips for processing into pulp. “This project will create long-term value and improve our capabilities as we work to become the best manufacturer in the industry,” said Drexel Lambert, vice president for Georgia-Pacific containerboard operations.

Packaging Corporation of America reported second quarter 2021 net income of $207 million, excluding special items. Second quarter net sales were $1.9 billion in 2021 and $1.5 billion in 2020. Commenting on reported results, Mark W. Kowlzan, Chairman and CEO, said, “Demand in our Packaging segment remained very strong. Our mills and plants continued to do an outstanding job of meeting our customers’ needs while managing through certain material and chemical availability issues, a tight labor market, various freight and logistics challenges, as well as the planned maintenance outages at four of our mills during the second quarter. The mills executed the planned outages extremely well and, with the help of the No. 3 machine at the Jackson Mill, provided our plants the necessary containerboard to achieve an all-time record for total box shipments. We were also able to build some much-needed inventory; however, our weeks-of-inventory supply was at a new low for this time of year ahead of an expected very busy second half. The sales groups in both the Packaging and Paper segments are doing a great job of implementing our previously announced price increases, and we continue to deliver on the numerous initiatives and capital projects to reduce costs and improve efficiencies across all of our mills and corrugated products plants. These efforts are extremely important as we continue to experience significant cost inflation across the Company as well as logistics challenges with both our inbound and outbound freight needs.”