Graphic Packaging Waco Recycled Paperboard Mill

New paper machines don’t get built in North America anymore. Graphic Packaging built one anyway. Its $1 billion greenfield recycled paperboard mill sits on 119 acres in Waco’s Texas Central Park and produced its first commercially saleable rolls in October 2025, opening that November.

Project Scope

The plant covers 640,000 square feet of production and warehousing and runs at a design capacity near 1,500 tons a day of coated recycled paperboard. The machine is modeled on the company’s K2 line in Kalamazoo, which started up in 2022 and hit full capacity inside twelve months, so Waco was deliberately sequenced to inherit K2’s commissioning lessons. A blended fiber line repurposes 250,000 tons a year of recyclable scrap paperboard pulled from Graphic Packaging plants across the country. A horizontal drum pulper on site can handle the fiber equivalent of up to 15 million paper cups a day, which puts it among the few U.S. mills configured to recover poly-coated cup stock at any real scale. The mill supports roughly 230 permanent jobs at an average salary of $65,000 plus benefits. Texas Central Park itself runs about 3,700 acres with 90-plus tenants and more than 12 million square feet of facilities.

Why It Matters

In 2026 the mill added an uncoated recycled paperboard grade carrying at least 45% postconsumer content, and the machine can swing between CRB and URB as demand moves. That flexibility is the whole bet. Site selection followed Texas triangle logic, putting about 80% of the state’s population inside a 200-mile radius. Full production is expected within 12 to 18 months of startup. Whether domestic recycled-fiber capacity can be added economically against imported board is still an open question, and this mill is the clearest test case anyone has built.

Project Team & Details