BY RICH COLLINS | Staff writer at Nola.com
Avondale Global Gateway, the logistics hub on the site of the former Avondale Shipyard, has a new tenant — the world’s largest supplier of the wood pulp used to make toilet paper, boxes, bags, and other paper products.
Suzano, a century-old company based in São Paulo, Brazil, has signed a five-year lease for 250,000 square feet of dedicated space at Avondale, where it will create 50 full-time jobs.
The west bank site will serve as one of several Suzano terminals in the central Gulf Coast that handles the company’s pulp shipments from Brazil before they’re distributed across North America by rail. The first vessel carrying the company’s material is scheduled to arrive next week.
Later in the month, the Brazilian company will send an even larger shipment to Avondale — a 55,000-ton shipment, its biggest ever delivered to a U.S. port, according to Adam Anderson, chairman and CEO of T. Parker Host, the facility’s parent company.
“They couldn’t do this anywhere else until we had this agreement done and have this dedicated space for them,” Anderson said in an interview Friday.
The lease is a win for Host. The 103-year-old shipping and logistics company acquired the former shipyard in 2018 and spent millions converting the dormant 275-acre site into a multimodal logistics hub but its progress remaking the facility has been slowed by the pandemic and other setbacks.
“Every ton Suzano moves through Avondale is cargo not going to Houston,” Osman Kazan, a professor at Tulane’s A.B. Freeman School of Business, said in an interview this week. “For a region that has long lost freight to Texas, a five-year commitment from a global player is a strong signal that Louisiana can compete.”
New life for historic shipyard
In addition to being a global leader in the industry, the publicly traded Suzano is one of Brazil’s largest exporters. It grows eucalyptus trees and uses them to make the soft fiber that is a raw material for dozens of paper products.
It operates throughout Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia and has mills across the U.S., including plants in Arkansas and North Carolina.
To help win the company’s business, Avondale officials made improvements to 245,000 square feet of warehouse space. The facility added new concrete flooring, five additional loading doors, loading platforms, overhead awnings, and a laser fire detection and suppression system. A $13 million rail expansion, partially funded by the state, is also underway at the site.
Avondale officials said the total investment tied to the Suzano operation, including the rail expansion, is expected to exceed $20 million.
The Suzano lease is one of several new deals Host is hoping to finalize in the coming months, Anderson said Friday.
Once home to one of the region’s largest employers, the Avondale facility currently supports more than 600 workers between its own employees, tenants and contractors working on construction projects onsite.
Anderson said the facility will move 2 million tons of material this year alone for hundreds of customers, including more than a half dozen tenants who have dedicated space onsite. The facility has five deep-water berths and more than 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space.
Kazan and local economic development officials said the Suzano deal shows that companies value Avondale’s direct river access, Union Pacific rail link and connections to five major railroads.
“Suzano’s decision to make Avondale Global Gateway its Gulf Coast hub is a natural fit,” said Matt Wolfe, chief marketing officer at Greater New Orleans Inc. “The rail expansion underway is exactly the kind of infrastructure investment that makes this possible. For a site built to manufacture and move goods at scale, this is a return to form.”
Email Rich Collins at rich.collins@theadvocate.com
