Cascades Inc.

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• Did you know2024

  Cascades produces both corrugated packaging (containerboard for Amazon boxes, grocery store corrugated displays, produce boxes) and tissue products (bath tissue, paper towels for commercial/institutional use) from the same recycled fiber supply chain. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, both product lines simultaneously experienced demand surges from opposite directions: corrugated demand surged due to e-commerce growth (every Amazon order, Instacart delivery, and DoorDash meal kit requires corrugated packaging); tissue demand surged due to panic buying and increased home use of toilet paper and paper towels. Cascades faced a demand surge in both its major product lines simultaneously while its recycled paper feedstock supply was disrupted (office buildings and commercial spaces that generate sorted office paper were empty, reducing high-quality DIP feedstock). The company that makes both your Amazon box and your office bathroom paper towels was capacity-constrained by the same paper recycling supply chain across both products, creating an unusual double-sided demand-supply pressure that vertically integrated fiber companies (with their own forests and mills) could absorb more easily than recycled-fiber companies dependent on recovered paper flows.

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• Origin2024

  Cascades was founded in 1964 in Kingsey Falls, a small Quebec town of approximately 2,000 people, by Bernard Lemaire and his brothers Antonio and Laurent. Bernard Lemaire's founding insight was that recycled paper (old newspaper, office waste, cardboard) was an underutilized raw material that cost less than virgin pulp while producing perfectly serviceable tissue and packaging products. In 1964, recycled fiber was considered low-quality industrial waste; the mainstream paper industry used virgin pulp from forests and viewed recycled content as a compromise. Cascades built a company with near-100% recycled fiber content as an explicit strategic choice and environmental commitment — decades before sustainability became a corporate imperative. Today, Cascades is a CAD 5-6B public company listed on the TSX, still headquartered in the same small Quebec town, still controlled by the Lemaire family, and still running on 80%+ recycled fiber content across its operations. The company that built a billion-dollar paper business on recycled waste paper in a small Quebec village in 1964 is now one of North America's largest tissue and packaging manufacturers — the ESG thesis as a 60-year business model.

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• Concentration2024

  Cascades, along with Resolute Forest Products (newsprint and SC papers) and Domtar (personal care, paper), constitutes the core of the Quebec-based North American paper manufacturing cluster — a geographic concentration of paper production that benefits from Quebec's hydroelectric power (among the lowest-cost industrial electricity in North America), proximity to forest fiber resources, and St. Lawrence Seaway logistics for both import (recovered paper from US cities) and export (packaging and tissue to US markets). Cascades specifically relies on the US recovered paper stream — collected from offices, retail stores, and curbside recycling in US cities — processed through its DIP mills in Quebec and distributed as tissue and packaging throughout North America. US recovered paper (generated by US consumers and businesses) is a primary input for Canadian manufacturing, and the resulting paper products flow back into US commerce — a cross-border recycled fiber loop that creates regulatory and logistical complexity for any US-Canada trade disruption affecting recovered paper exports.

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