Chillicothe — I personally met the leadership of US Paper Mill on September 2nd, where they gave me a briefing on the current activities and visioning of the company – including their contribution towards ongoing environmental maintenance near the former paper mill.
I had been invited the day before. I was brought into worn paper mill offices that had been built into the front of the former shipping warehouse along East 8th Street, clearly repurposed as senior management and staff offices.
Owner John Todoroki personally greeted me and led his team in briefing me for about an hour, including a couple of slide shows. They later shared their “Environmental Update” presentation, and I present its slides below.
Todoroki surprised me by not having any accent. He mentioned that he is Japanese – and that part of his efforts push back against Chinese economic and technological activities. He was plain-spoken and casual – except when expressing frustrations, when his language became a little colorful.
One of the staff also gave me a brief tour of the mill, which I had never had – and as a local historian, have been wanting. The huge industrial facility with layers of additions and changes since the 1920s was organized, relatively clean, and had several training rooms being renovated.
After that I was treated to lunch (I think from 7 Mile Smokehouse). I was told that Todoroki usually pays for a couple lunches a week when he is in town for his approximately 150 employees – most of them former paper mill employees, like most of his senior staff.
I was asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement by the armed guard at the main gate. He quickly said that it was standard procedure to ask for an NDA, but if the management did not require me to sign it, I didn’t need to. No one ever did.
It was explained to me that since the glove production line was under government contract, they were required to have security, request an NDA, and to not allow close-up photography.
The “Environmental Update” presentation, which I was asked to not release until after the September 8th Chillicothe Council review session, is largely self-explanatory. It addresses four major issues:
The plume of toxins in the ground under the former Wear-Ever factory (now Howmet Aerospace) on Eastern Avenue was prominent in the news in the summer of 2025. (See one of my stories on it: “Chillicothe Mayor Explains Communications with EPA on Wear-Ever Pollution and Old City Landfill.”
The wide Paint Creek floodplain south of Grandview Cemetery hill was used as a dump site for the paper mill for decades. It was closed and covered over with a regulation cap in the 1980s and 1990s.
The paper mill also built a large wastewater treatment plant south of the mill, on the other side of Paint Creek – with a large lagoon that produces its own fog on some mornings.
The notorious “smell of money” from the paper mill did not come from the famous smokestack, but from ground-level processing. US Paper Mill has said that if they can restart paper manufacturing there – including Paper Machine 12, “The Chief” – they will ship in pulp, and not produce it and its odor on-site.
