Nippon Paper Industries said on the 6th that it will not restart paper and pulp production at its Yatsushiro mill in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, which was damaged in the July Kumamoto earthquake, and will end operations there. The production equipment was badly destroyed and restoring it would cost a large sum, so the company gave up on reopening.
The Yatsushiro mill began operating in October 1924 as a plant of Kyushu Paper, one of Nippon Paper's predecessor companies. It was the only mill in Kyushu making newsprint, and supplied mainly newspaper companies in the region.
The mill bought raw materials from several dozen companies in Kyushu in transactions worth billions of yen, the company said. Its most recent output was about 200,000 tons a year, worth roughly 30 billion yen.
Chimneys collapsed, nine died
In the July earthquake, three of the mill's five chimneys were destroyed. One fell onto an office building on the site, killing nine people, including employees of a contractor.
A damage survey found that simply removing the ruined equipment would take about three to four years. According to people connected to the company, the cost was estimated at roughly 100 billion yen — comparable to what it took to restore the Ishinomaki mill in Miyagi Prefecture after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
With paper demand falling and the company shrinking its domestic production capacity, it judged that spending heavily on restoration was not feasible.
“Unfortunately, we reached the judgment that restoring it to its former state would be extremely difficult.”President Akira Sebe, at a news conference
The closure removes a major employer and buyer of materials from a regional city, at a time when rural areas are steadily losing the industrial base that sustains them.