PORT ANGELES — The new president of Nippon Paper Industries USA Co., Ltd., Yuji Sato, a former company researcher who helped develop paper cups for Starbucks, will continue the policies of his predecessor at Nippon in pressing forward with his Port Angeles mill’s plans for a biomass energy project.
Opponents of the project appealed the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency permit for the expanded cogeneration facility Thursday.
(See related Peninsula Daily News story today, “Work under way on Nippon Paper’s biomass project; opponents’ appeal still to be heard.”)
“There will be no big changes,” Sato said in Japanese in an interview that same day, speaking frequently through an interpreter, company senior adviser David Tamaki.
Tamaki, also fluent in French will act as Sato’s interpreter when the need arises.
“We are going ahead with cogeneration,” Sato said.
Sato, 54, replaces Yoshiaki “Johnny” Uchida, 51, who was company president for 2½ years before Sato took over the top spot July 14. Uchida succeeded Tamaki as president.
The Nippon mill on Ediz Hook produces paper products, primarily telephone directory paper and including newsprint. The Peninsula Daily News is one of its customers. The mill is also the headquarters of Nippon Paper Industries USA, part of Nippon Paper Group, a giant, Tokyo-based holding company that oversees about 180 affiliates and related companies worldwide with 14,000 employees.
Uchida’s tenure has been somewhat of a roller coaster ride, he said.
The paper industry “has hugely changed” in that time period, especially this year, Uchida said.
Raw materials have suffered a “huge” price increase, and paper companies have shut down, he said.
“It’s been a very tough situation for the last three to six months.”
Sato and Uchida are switching mills.
From 2008 until being promoted to his new post, Sato worked as general manager of the technical services department at the Iwakuni and Ishinomaki paper mills in Japan.
Ishinomaki is the flagship mill of Nippon Paper Industries Co. Ltd.
Uchida leaves Thursday to become general manager of the production department at Ishinomaki and help restart the plant, which was shut down after Japan’s devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
“I’m going to have a big challenge to starting the old mill within this year,” Uchida said.
“This is a big challenge.”
Nippon’s Port Angeles plant, which generates a $25 million annual payroll for about 200 employees, also produces 160,000 tons of paper products yearly, compared with Ishinomaki’s 1 million tons.
The Port Angeles mill, built by Isidore Zellerbach in 1920 as Washington Pulp & Paper Co. and which carried the name Crown Zellerbach for most of its 90 years, became part of Nippon when it acquired another Japanese-owned company, Daishowa America Ltd., in 2003. Daishowa took over the mill in 1988.
In addition to Nippon USA, the parent company partly owns North Pacific Paper Corporation (NORPAC) in Longview, Wash., one of the largest paper mills in North America, as a joint-venture with Weyerhaeuser, the largest U.S. forestry company.
The Port Angeles mill is the only mill that Nippon fully owns in the United States and is the only manufacturer of paper used to make telephone books left in the nation after a mill in Maine closed last April.
Sato, who majored in cellulose chemistry at the University of Tokyo and has a master’s degree in agriculture, has helped develop paper-coating technology for Nippon and added new product lines, including paper for Starbucks Coffee paper cups.
“The time is ripe for developing new grades of paper, and this is something in his alley, so to speak, so he will concentrate his efforts in that area as well,” Tamaki said.
Sato will be renting the same company apartment in Port Angeles as Uchida did.
Neither has lived with their families in Japan on a regular basis while working at various Nippon plants, Uchida for more than three years — he’ll remain apart from them when he returns to Japan — and Sato for five years.
“I miss my family very much in this five years,” said Sato, whose family lives in Hiroshima City.
“This is not uncommon,” Tamaki said.
Mill manager Harold Norlund will help Sato adjust to mill operations, Tamaki said.
While in Japan working near an American military base, Sato was a member of the Japanese-American Society “in order to make friendly relations with America . . . and the Japanese people,” he said.
“I would also like to do so here.”
