GP Serving Lincoln County's Economy For 70-Years

Georgia-Pacific touts 70 years in Toledo, big role in local jobs and cardboard supply.

Georgia-Pacific’s Toledo mill is preparing to mark 70 years in Lincoln County, and company representatives say the facility remains a major economic driver and key player in the West Coast cardboard box supply chain — even as it faces growing regulatory pressures.

Speaking at a recent Newport chamber lunch, Andrea Formo with Georgia Pacific, described the Toledo operation as Georgia-Pacific’s only mill built from the ground up, with construction starting in 1957.

“We’ve been here since 1957,” Formo said, noting many of the more than 450 employees are second- or third-generation mill workers. “We’re not just this big entity. We are members of this community, and we want to be good partners, good neighbors.”

What the Toledo mill makes

The Toledo facility is an integrated pulp and paper mill, meaning it has everything on-site to turn raw materials into finished product. The mill does not make toilet paper, paper towels, or finished cardboard boxes. Instead, it produces linerboard and medium, the two paper layers that are glued together and corrugated to become cardboard.

Those huge rolls of linerboard are cut to customer specifications and shipped primarily to box plants — many in California — that manufacture boxes for agriculture, e-commerce, medical, and other industries.

The mill must meet strict strength standards known as “crush tests,” which are printed on the box stamp you can find on the bottom of most shipping boxes. “If we say it’s 65 pounds, we’ve got to own that,” Formo said, pointing to examples like wet produce boxes that need to hold up through shipping.

How the mill operates and recycles

The presentation included a layman’s walkthrough of the pulp and paper process. Wood chips arrive at the mill and are cooked in large digesters with a chemical solution called “white liquor” to break them down into a brown pulp. The used solution, now “black liquor,” is burned in recovery boilers to generate steam and energy for the mill, then cycled back through a chemical recovery process as “green liquor” and re-used.

The mill also takes in bales of old corrugated cardboard (OCC) — the broken-down boxes you see stacked behind big-box stores — and runs them through a pulper that separates out plastics, wires, and other debris. The recovered fiber is then screened, thickened, and sent into the paper-making system.

Cardboard fiber can be recycled about seven times before it becomes unusable, Formo said, adding that new technology could extend that number. “So please recycle,” she told the audience.

Environmental footprint

Georgia-Pacific emphasized that the Toledo operation is trying to run efficiently and within environmental standards. The mill is certified under the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which the company says ensures its wood fiber is sourced ethically and sustainably. According to the presentation, for every tree removed, three are planted.

The site also earned an EPA Energy Star certification in 2025, a distinction the company said required significant effort to improve energy efficiency. Water use is another focus. Only about 12 percent of the water brought into the mill is actually consumed in the process, with the rest cycled through the system up to seven times before treatment and discharge.

Economic impact in Lincoln County

Georgia-Pacific hired economists last year to analyze its economic impact. According to the presentation, in 2025 the mill generated about $117–118 million in labor income in Lincoln County alone, roughly 9 percent of all income earned in the county.

The operation supports about 1,560 full and part-time jobs in the local economy when indirect impacts are included. “For every one job at the mill in the local economy, we create another 2.63-ish,” Formo said. At the statewide level, that multiplier climbs closer to 5.8 when contractors and supply chains are factored in.

The mill also adds an estimated $275 million to local GDP (2024 figures), about 13 percent of Lincoln County’s total GDP, according to the analysis. The plant’s regular maintenance “outage” in March — when production is shut down so work crews can tackle repairs and capital projects — brings in around 1,800 contractors. Many stay in local hotels, eat in restaurants, buy gas, and bring family members during a typically slower time on the coast.

Partnerships with schools and college

A major theme of the talk was workforce development and the need for skilled trades such as pipefitters and millwrights. Georgia-Pacific is working with local high schools and Oregon Coast Community College to build a pipeline of future workers.

Formo said the company wants to “provide good, stable jobs” and help local residents gain the education needed to qualify for them, keeping families in the area and continuing the multi-generational tradition of mill employment.

Local hiring is preferred, Formo said, but not always possible. One of the biggest barriers to recruitment, she added, is housing. “Housing is absolutely a challenge, especially for a family,” she said, describing the difficulty of convincing recruits from the Southeast or Midwest to relocate to a high-cost coastal housing market.

Regulatory challenges

While Georgia-Pacific leaders say the company is committed to Toledo and has made recent investments to improve and rebuild capacity, they also warned that Oregon’s regulatory environment is increasingly difficult for manufacturers.

“The regulatory climate here in Oregon is quite challenging,” Formo said. She stressed that the company supports regulation and sees it as a core difference between American manufacturing and operations in some other countries, especially in terms of environmental and worker protections. But she said overlapping and sometimes conflicting rules can make long-term operations harder.

She also pointed to recent drops in manufacturing employment in Oregon and referenced manufacturers — including steel operations — that have left the state in 2025, according to a graph shown during the talk. Formo concluded with an emphasis on Georgia Pacific's committment to Lincoln County.

More information about the Geogia Pacific Toledo Mill can be found on their website.