Jul 09, 2008. /Lesprom.com/. The Newark Group, Cranford, N.J., is closing two of its three paperboard mills in the Northeast next month due to escalating energy and freight costs, reports Forestweb. Haverhill Paperboard in Bradford, Massachusetts, will close on August 29 and Bennington Paperboard in North Hoosick, N.Y., will shut on August 30. The Haverhill mill produces 144 thousand tons a year of uncoated recycled boxboard (URB). Selected grades of URB produced at the two locations will be made available to the company’s customers from alternate Newark paperboard sites. At a bondholders meeting in May, the company said that even though the industry has rationalized about 1.5 million tons over the past several years, it still believes there remains some overcapacity in URB that made pricing moves difficult. “Overcapacity has plagued the paperboard industry over the last seven years,” the company said in its 2007 annual report. “Although much has been taken off-line by industry-wide shutdowns over that same period, we believe there may still be some overcapacity remaining. As a result of these closures, and a shift of business to other mills, our paperboard mills’ capacity utilization rate has risen from a low of 89% in 2002 to 95% for 2007.” More recently, The Newark Group cited industry data putting U.S. capacity at around 4.9 million tons for URB and capacity utilization at 92%. Coated recycled boxboard capacity was put at 2.1 million tons, with operating rates of almost 100%.