Rather than shut down the plant, Newark’s leaders decided to invest $300,000 to $600,000 in new equipment and is training employees to do different work for the Cranford, N. J.-based company. Now, Newark in Franklin, on Chestnut Street, makes heavy industrial tubes and cores from paperboard for the roofing materials, rugs and carpets, mailing, and packaging industries.
These cores are a quarter to half an inch thick and can be as long as six to eight feet.
The Franklin plant also has other capabilities such as taking rolls of paperboard and slitting them to smaller widths, and turning rolls of paperboard into sheets. It no longer makes laminated products, Papa said.
“We brought in new machines, we arranged the factory floor. We added dryers into the plant because these cores have to be dried after they’re glued,” Papa said.
Newark invested in rather than closed the Warren County manufacturing plant because “we had a great workforce there. We own the building and it’s a good building,” he said.
It’s expensive to transport tubes and cores and the Franklin location “gives us reach into the Ohio Valley, from a shipping standpoint,” he added.
The project started in 2013 and the new equipment has been installed. There a remaining two to three months of training on the new equipment left to complete, the chief executive said.
Newark Recycled Paperboard has about 31 facilities and 1,500 employees nationwide. The company sources all its raw material from recycled cardboard — collecting about 1.4 million tons a year — and breaks it down at paper mills to make paperboard. Paperboard is what a cereal box is made of, for example.
Some of the material is sold and some of the paperboard goes to converting plants like the one in Franklin to make end products. Franklin is one of 11 tube and core plants owned and operated by Newark, Papa said.
Newark purchased the Franklin site, at 300 Chestnut St., in 1993, company officials said.
The same company, formerly known as The Newark Group, closed the paper mill Franklin Boxboard Corp. on East Sixth Street in 2011, cutting about 80 jobs at the time.
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