Publicly traded · NYSE: GEF
Greif makes industrial packaging - steel and plastic drums, intermediate bulk containers - and containerboard and paperboard. For most of its modern history it also owned Southern timberland through its Soterra land management business. That is no longer true.
Yes - this company buys wood from outside its own ownership.
Pulpwood is one of the principal raw materials of its paper packaging business, and it says it satisfies most of its need for those raw materials through purchases on the open market or under short-term and long-term supply agreements. Having sold its own timberland, everything it consumes is now bought.
This is a company-level answer taken from what the company itself publishes. Every mill sets its own specifications, haul radius and gate price, and any of them can stop buying without notice. Confirm with the mill before you put a crew on the ground — and for a real number on a real tract, let buyers bid against each other.
Paper packaging mills in the Southern states; the timberland it held in the South has been sold.
Find the mills in your county in the state agency directories.
Speaks as of 30 September 2025
Checked against these documents on 14 August 2026. AXE USA has no relationship with Greif: nobody paid to be listed, this profile is not a recommendation, and nothing here is investment advice. If a fact disagrees with the company itself, the company is right.
The outlet for small-diameter and thinning wood a sawmill will not take. When a mill in this group idles a machine, pulpwood demand in that basket follows.
Publicly traded· NYSE: CLW
Clearwater Paper is a paperboard producer supplying independent converters. It is the smallest of the listed paper companies here by headcount and runs its own wood chipping facilities to hold its fibre position.
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Privately held
Georgia-Pacific is one of the largest forest products companies in the world - tissue, pulp, paper, packaging, cellulose and building products - and has been an independently operated and managed subsidiary of Koch, Inc. since 2005. It started in Augusta, Georgia in 1927 and is now headquartered at 133 Peachtree Street in Atlanta.
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Publicly traded· NYSE: IP
International Paper is one of the largest producers of containerboard and corrugated packaging in the world, and one of the largest consumers of Southern pulpwood. It sold off its timberland decades ago, so every ton of wood its Southern mills consume is bought.
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Publicly traded· Nasdaq: MERC
Mercer is a market pulp producer with mills in Germany and Canada and a solid wood business making lumber and mass timber. Market pulp is a commodity sold on delivered price, which leaves the company exposed when pulp prices fall - and they have.
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Publicly traded· NYSE: PKG
PCA is the third-largest containerboard producer in the United States and reports in three segments: Packaging, Paper, and Corporate and Other. It operates primarily in the United States and is a steady pulpwood outlet in the baskets around its mills.
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