Nelson sawmill closure confirmed with loss of 142 jobs

Thursday, 4 September 2025

The closure of Nelson’s Eves Valley sawmill has been confirmed with 142 job losses.

Staff were told of the closure proposal two weeks ago, with owners Carter Holt Harvey signalling its intention to centralise production at its Kawerau site in Bay of Plenty.

After a consultation period, a final decision to close the mill, near Brightwater, southwest of Nelson, was announced to staff on Thursday afternoon. Workers leaving the plant around 3pm were holding letters and not willing to talk, although one said he was heading home with “bad news”.

The company have not made a public statement, but it’s understood the closure will take effect immediately. The mill was built in the 1980s, and many of the workers had been employed for decades.

E tū union delegate Maria Hemara said in a statement that the announcement was devastating.

“I feel like I’ve lost my whole family. We work together for 40 hours a week, we’ve built friendships, and it’s all being taken away. It’s like going to your own funeral.

“I’ll be looking for jobs – I’ve tried supermarkets, and other mills around here. If not, I’ll have to go temping or something.”

Hemara said the closure would be a burden for the whole community.

E tū National Secretary Rachel Mackintosh said Carter Holt Harvey had made a strategic decision that ignored the human cost.

“This isn’t a company going broke – they’ve chosen to centralise operations in Kawerau. But we’re talking about people’s lives here, and it’s cold comfort for more than 140 workers who are now facing unemployment in a region already hit hard,” she said.

The union would do all it could to support its members and expected the the Government to also “step up” with targeted support.

Tasman mayor Tim King and Nelson mayor Nick Smith had urged the company to delay the closure for a year so the mill could be used to process trees brought down in recent storms.

In a letter to Carter Holt Harvey, released on Wednesday, the mayors said about 5500 hectares of forestry was flattened in June and July after sodden ground and strong winds combined.

They argued the mill was critical infrastructure for dealing with the storm damage, which left a huge volume of timber needing urgent processing.

The company had not responded to the mayors’ request.

King said on Thursday he was “gutted” and “beyond sad” about the closure.

He had received video messages from mill workers showing the last log being unloaded, and an hour or so later, the last plank emerging.

“I've lived next to it for my whole life, so every day I drive past it, I walk around and I'm shifting cattle or sheep, and it's banging and making noise and making steam,” he said.

“For it to be sitting there idle, doing nothing as a site is tragic for the region, it’s tragic for the people who work there and for the economy. It’s bloody disappointing.”

Over its 40 years, the mill had employed thousands of people, and had produced an “almost unimaginable amount” of sawn timber, which had then gone into houses and buildings and been sent all over the country.

King said while he understood the business decision around rationalizing productivity, what was worse was the company’s reluctance for somebody else to utilize the site.

He understood Carter Holt Harvey had been approached by a number of parties who wished to make use of the site for different purposes, and so far, none of those approaches had come to fruition.

That was disappointing from the region’s perspective, he said.