Hurricane Helene has dealt serious damage to Pactiv Evergreen’s shuttered Canton paper mill, but the St. Louis-based demolition and development company owner trying to buy the 185-acre parcel remains undeterred. 

Hurricane Helene has dealt serious damage to Pactiv Evergreen’s shuttered Canton paper mill, but the St. Louis-based demolition and development company owner trying to buy the 185-acre parcel remains undeterred.

Pactiv Evergreen has filed a request with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality to make “major” modifications to the discharge permit for its wastewater treatment facility in Canton.  

The effects of deadly flooding in 2021 are still being felt in the town of Canton, but thanks to a federal funding request from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), the town is poised to take another huge step toward recovery.

A rezoning of the former paper mill parcel in Canton has replaced an expiring industrial development moratorium, maintaining the town’s limited control of the site despite the possibility of an impending sale to a developer with unknown intentions. 

Pactiv Evergreen, owner of the now-shuttered paper mill in Canton, announced last week that it had agreed to sell its Pine Bluff, Arkansas paper mill and an extrusion facility off Howell Mill Road in Waynesville to a South American company for $110 million during the fourth quarter of 2024, if traditional closing conditions are met and foreign antitrust regulators approve. 

The shuttered paper mill at the heart of Canton is still there — for now. One day it won’t be, but a forthcoming monument will ensure the generations of papermakers that made Canton great won’t ever be forgotten.

A full year after one of the county’s largest employers — the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill, in downtown Canton — shut its doors, Canton’s governing board adopted a conservative budget for fiscal year 2024-25 that contains no property tax increase. 

Administrators for the Town of Canton have presented a conservative fiscal year 2024-25 budget that seeks some sense of sustainability after last year’s closing of the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill, which created a substantial revenue deficit and has now forced the small town to plan for a huge new expense it’s never had to worry about before.

In the hours following the announcement that Pactiv Evergreen’s paper mill property in Canton may have a new owner in the coming months, news came and fast and furious.