Toilet Paper Capital: The Fox River Paper Industry
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
The Fox River runs through the heart of Green Bay, and for most of the twentieth century it ran the color of the industry built along its banks. Paper. Specifically, sanitary paper, bath tissue, facial tissue, paper towels, produced at a scale that earned Green Bay an unofficial title it has owned since the early nineteen hundreds: the Toilet Paper Capital of the World.
The paper industry moved up the Fox River Valley from southeastern Wisconsin in the late eighteen hundreds, drawn by three things: abundant water power from the river's drop across a series of falls, proximity to the timber forests of the north, and rail connections to every major market. By the eighteen seventies, the Fox Valley held the greatest concentration of paper mills on earth. Fort Howard Paper Company built its mills on the west bank of the Fox in Green Bay and focused specifically on mass-production sanitary goods.
Northern Paper Mills followed. Green Bay Packaging established operations that still run today. The industry's environmental cost accumulated invisibly for decades.
Between the nineteen fifties and nineteen seventies, seven Fox River Valley paper companies discharged carbonless copy paper manufacturing waste into the river, releasing polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs. The contamination spread across thirty-nine miles of the lower river and into Green Bay itself. By nineteen seventy-nine the federal government had banned PCBs entirely.
The cleanup stretched well over a decade, with major dredging and capping work through the twenty tens. Millions of cubic yards of contaminated sediment were removed, and the project was declared substantially complete in the early twenty twenties. PCB concentrations in the river have fallen by roughly ninety percent.
Wisconsin remains home to more paper mills than any other state in the country.
