Visy Industries paper mill the largest manufacturing investment in NYC since WW2

A concept exported from Australia, Visy Industries’ revolutionary idea to build a paper mill on Statten Island has become the largest manufacturing investment of any kind in New York City since WW2. Rather than sourcing timber as the input for the paper mill, Visy Industries took consumer wastepaper from New York City to revolutionise the production of paper. “New York offered us 150,000 tonnes of wastepaper,” Visy Industries Executive Chairman Anthony Pratt told Sky News. “New York is the home of wastepaper in the world because it’s such a massive population. It’s the urban forest”. These days, the mill recycles around 250,000 tonnes of New York’s wastepaper each year, which three quarters of the city’s collectable waste. “Our paper mill concept that we exported from Australia was very much about collecting waste from the streets of New York and other cities around the world, putting it through our paper mill to make big rolls of paper, and then turning it into cardboard boxes like Amazon uses. “So that in a sense is our supply chain.” Image: AP