Publicly traded · NYSE: SW
Smurfit Westrock was formed by the 2024 combination of Smurfit Kappa and WestRock and is one of the largest paper-based packaging companies in the world. It describes its system as vertically integrated: it takes in wood or recovered fibre, makes board, and converts that board into corrugated and consumer packaging.
Yes - this company buys wood from outside its own ownership.
Its virgin containerboard and paperboard mills run on hardwood and softwood fibre; its recycled mills run on recovered fibre. The Southern mills in that system are pulpwood buyers, purchasing at the mill gate and through dealers.
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.
Its North America segment - about half its workforce - includes virgin fibre mills in the Southern states.
Find the mills in your county in the state agency directories.
Speaks as of 31 December 2025
Checked against these documents on 14 August 2026. AXE USA has no relationship with Smurfit Westrock: 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: 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.
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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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