Paper mates: what's old becomes new again at Jackson Paper's mountain mill.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: PICTURE THIS

Sweat pours off mechanic Rick Crawford at Jackson Paper Manufacturing Co. in downtown Sylva, within walking distance of three breweries, ice cream at Jack the Dipper, quinoa salad at City Lights Cafe and the historic Jackson County courthouse. Tourism may be king now, but the gritty work of papermaking has been part of the town since the 1920s.

The mill is where Jackson Paper president Nicki Slusser feels most at home. She grew up hopping around the South with her mill-worker dad and even worked at one through college at the University of Kentucky, spending the next 34 years helping run some of the nation's biggest plants for industry giants Richmond, Va.-based MeadWestvaco Corp. and Memphis-based International Paper Co., which has 58,000 employees and annual revenue of $23.6 billion. She retired in 2012 with plans to live at her mountain home at Lake Logan in Haywood County, until Jackson Paper CEO Tim Campbell, a friend of her father's, asked her to run the mill in Sylva.

Slusser oversees more than 100,000 tons of paper rolling off Jackson's line every year, bound for customers across the country who use the paper to make corrugated containers, which are then sold to other customers. If you were to take apart a shipping box, sandwiched between the outside liners is a fluted piece of paper. That paper is made in Sylva, though someone else does the bending or corrugating to give it a wavy appearance. In paper speak, it's called corrugated medium, and it's part of the fastest-growing segment of the paper industry. Online deliveries are one reason, but grocery chains and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Costco also ship most of their goods in corrugated containers.

Jackson Paper is one of the smaller plants Slusser has run, but it's one of only three paper mills in the U.S. that does not discharge any waste into surface or municipal water supplies. All of the water Jackson uses--900,000 gallons at any given time --is recycled. Recycling is the business model here. Bales of used cardboard boxes, arriving daily by tractor-trailer, are turned into clean sheets of paper. It begins with a machine resembling an enormous blender, about 20 feet in diameter, in which boxes plus water are cooked into a slurry that is piped from one building to another housing Jackson's sole paper-making machine. The slurry is then poured onto a continuously moving screen for the laborious process of removing water.

"The process of making paper is mostly about losing...