Westvaco Corporation - Stock Certificate

Specimen Stock printed by American Bank Note Company.

MeadWestvaco Corporation was an American packaging company based in Richmond, Virginia. It had approximately 23,000 employees. In February 2006, it moved its corporate headquarters to Richmond. In March 2008, the company announced a change to start using "MWV" as its brand, but the legal name of the company remained MeadWestvaco.

MeadWestvaco announced in January 2015 that it would form a combined $16 billion company with RockTenn to take on market leaders in the packaging industry in the U.S. The combined company is named WestRock.

MeadWestvaco was a producer of packaging, specialty papers, consumer and office products and specialty chemicals. The company had 153 operating and office locations in 30 countries, and served customers in over 100 countries. The company’s paperboard, package and paper brands included Carrier Kote, Custom Kote, Printkote, Tango, Digipak, Amaray, Dosepak and Vision. MeadWestvaco held leading positions in the markets it served. MeadWestvaco managed over 3 million acres (12,000 km²) of forestlands that met environmental standards and was certified to Sustainable Forestry Initiative standards.

MeadWestvaco was formed in January 2002 as the result of a merger between The Mead Corporation of Dayton, Ohio, and Westvaco (originally the Piedmont Pulp and Paper Company and then the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company).

The ancestor of the Mead Paper Company started out in the paper business in 1846 but did not adopt the name Mead until 1882. Over the decades, Mead diversified into many different businesses and economic sectors, through purchases, mergers and joint ventures. It was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1935. In 1966, Mead acquired Westab, whose product line included the Big Chief tablet, Spiral Notebook brand and Hytone Notebooks.

In 1968, Mead entered the information technology sector by acquiring a small company called Data Corporation for $6 million, and renamed it Mead Data Central. Mead was originally interested in an inkjet printing system developed by Data. However, Data had also been working on a full-text information retrieval system for the U.S. Air Force, and by 1967 had adapted this product to the task of indexing and searching legal precedent as part of an experiment with the Ohio State Bar. After an Arthur D. Little study indicated that the information retrieval product had a promising future, Mead Data Central launched it as the LEXIS legal research system in 1973. In December 1994, Mead sold the LexisNexis system to Reed Elsevier for $1.5 billion.

The U.S. state of Illinois subsequently audited Mead's income tax returns and charged Mead an additional $4 million in income tax and penalties for the sale of LexisNexis; Mead paid the tax under protest, then sued for a refund in an Illinois state court. On April 15, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Mead that the Illinois courts had incorrectly applied the Court's precedents on whether Illinois could constitutionally apply its income tax to Mead, an out-of-state, Ohio-based corporation. The Court reversed and remanded so that the lower courts could apply the correct test and determine whether Mead and Lexis were a "unitary" business.

In 1986, Mead acquired Ampad makers of legal pads which it sold in 1992 to Bain Capital.

Mead acquired the Hilroy Companies in 1994 from a consortium of banks that had purchased Olympia and York from the receiver, O&Y's subsidiary through Abitibi-Price.

In 2005, the Papers business unit—including both Mead and Westvaco paper mills—was sold to the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management for about $2.3 billion. The new company is called NewPage Corporation, which operated from Dayton, Ohio for a time until it outgrew its facilities. NewPage is currently headquartered in Miamisburg, Ohio.

In 2008, MeadWestvaco sold its Charleston, SC kraft paper mill to Kapstone Paper and Packaging.

MeadWestvaco began using the "MWV" brand in 2008.

In February 2011, MeadWestvaco sold its Envelope Products Business including the Columbian Brand Envelope to Cenveo Corporation's Quality Park Envelope Products Group.

In 2012, ACCO Brands acquired the consumer and office products businesses, including Mead, Five Star, AT-A-GLANCE, Cambridge, Day Runner, Hilroy, Tilibra, and Grafons.

In 2002, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have identified MeadWestvaco as the 57th-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States, with roughly 35,000 pounds of toxic chemicals released annually into the air. Major pollutants indicated by the study include sulfuric acid, chlorine dioxide, chlorine, and methyl iodide.

MWV took steps to improve its environmental impact by upholding both mandated and voluntary performance standards. It was included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, a system that tracks the financial performance of leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide. MWV met the carbon reduction targets of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the world's first and North America's only legally binding rules-based greenhouse gas emissions allowance trading system. It held leadership positions in and actively supports Sustainable Packaging Coalition, Cerflor, CCX, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Abundant Forests Alliance, Duke University Climate Change Policy Partnership and Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

In 2002, MeadWestvaco established the MeadWestvaco Foundation as a vehicle to appropriately give back to the communities in which its employees live and work. The Foundation works closely with local MWV business unit managers to determine the goals, priorities, and strategies best for each location.

The Foundation’s 2007 contributions totaled roughly $3.7million. Funds were allocated to the following categories: United Way, education, environment, health & human services, culture & art, and civic organizations. MWV employees, families, and friends also contributed over 46,000 volunteer hours to schools, charitable organizations, and public institutions.

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