Nonwoven Fabric Mills (U.S.) — NAICS Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 31323. A general-audience guide for public-market and private investors.

Short page — this level equals its one child. NAICS 31323 (Nonwoven Fabric Mills) is a five-digit "NAICS industry" that contains exactly one six-digit national industry: 313230, also called Nonwoven Fabric Mills. The two codes cover the identical set of businesses, so the numbers on this page and the child page are the same. This page gives the quick orientation and the ground-truth federal figures; for the full treatment — process types, the company-by-company investable universe, margins, demand drivers, regulation, and outlook — see the 313230 primer.

1. Overview

Nonwoven fabric is cloth made without weaving or knitting. A mill takes plastic pellets or loose fibers and bonds them into a web directly — by heat, chemicals, water jets, or barbed needles. The output is the disposable engineered material behind baby diapers, wet wipes, surgical gowns, N95 mask filters, house wrap, road-bed fabric, and car-interior padding.[1] It is a capital-intensive process-manufacturing business — closer to a plastics or paper plant than to a garment maker. A single modern production line costs roughly $30–50 million; INDA notes that projects can range from a few million dollars to more than $500 million depending on process, scale, and associated infrastructure.[1][2] Owners make money on a spread (the gap between the fabric's selling price and the cost of the resin that goes into it) multiplied by how much volume they push through expensive, always-on production lines.[1]

For investors, the appeal is demand anchored to non-discretionary consumption and long secular tailwinds (aging populations, hygiene adoption, filtration, infrastructure); the caution is a low-margin, scale-driven, commodity-leaning field with real cyclicality.[1] All of this is developed in full in the child primer.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is a nested hierarchy: each digit adds detail. The five-digit NAICS industry 31323 is one step above the six-digit national industry 313230. In this case the parent has a single child:

When a five-digit industry has just one six-digit child, the two are coextensive — every mill counted at 31323 is the same mill counted at 313230, and the federal statistical agencies publish the same values at both levels. There is nothing at this level that is not in the child. So this page is a pass-through: read it for the shape of the industry, then go to 313230 for the detail.

What the code includes: merchant mills that make nonwoven roll goods (fabric sold by the tonne) via spunbond, meltblown, spunmelt (SMS), spunlace, needlepunch, and airlaid/wetlaid processes.[3] What it excludes (this matters for sizing): the synthetic-fiber and resin suppliers upstream (325220); woven, knit, yarn, and fabric-finishing mills (the 313110–313310 family); converters that cut and sew roll goods into finished goods (314xxx); diapers, pads, and tampons assembled from nonwovens plus pulp (322291, Sanitary Paper Product Manufacturing); finished medical devices such as gowns and masks (339113); and the machinery makers that build the lines.[4] The full exclusion list and process glossary live in the child primer.

3. How big it is (this level's rollup figures)

Because 31323 equals 313230, these are the federal ground-truth figures for both. They come from our ingested stats for this level.[1][4]

Concentration. By antitrust math the merchant field is only moderately fragmented: the top four firms make about 26.5% of shipments, the top eight 42.3%, the top twenty 66%, and the top fifty 87.1%; the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (a standard concentration gauge that sums the squared market shares of all firms) is just 322.8 — well below the 1,500 threshold regulators treat as "moderately concentrated."[4] A few giants exist, but a long tail of specialty mills keeps the measured field dispersed. (These 2022 figures predate the 2024 Magnera merger the child primer describes.)

Undercount caveat. Federal 313230/31323 statistics understate the true U.S. nonwovens economy because of captive production: consumer-products companies such as Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble spin their own nonwovens in-house to feed their diaper and wipe lines, and that output is generally booked under the parent's primary industry (sanitary paper products, 322291), not here. DuPont's flashspun Tyvek and glass-fiber mats can likewise land in chemical or glass codes. So the ~$7.70 billion of receipts is the market-sold slice; the total value of nonwoven fabric made in the U.S. is meaningfully larger. For scale, North American nonwovens capacity reached about 5.73 million tonnes in 2024 (the United States represents approximately 88% of that total);[2][5] North America imported 403,900 tonnes from outside the region and exported 98,700 tonnes in 2022, leaving net imports of 305,200 tonnes — equivalent to 6.5% of regional production.[5] The global nonwovens market was estimated near $44 billion.[6]

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates)

With one child, all the exposure sits in that single industry — there is no second sub-industry to diversify across. Value concentrates in a handful of scale players at the commodity end and a fragmented specialty tail (filtration, medical barrier, high-temperature, glass-mat). The public market offers essentially one U.S.-listed pure play, Magnera (NYSE: MAGN), the world's largest nonwovens producer (~$3.2B FY2025 revenue),[7] plus nonwoven lines buried inside diversified companies — Mativ (MATV) for filtration, healthcare, and industrial media;[8] DuPont (Tyvek); Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble (captive hygiene); Amcor (post–Berry Global); Owens Corning (glass mats); Berkshire Hathaway's Johns Manville (~$725M nonwovens sales in 2024);[9] and international listings such as Indorama Ventures (Avgol hygiene), Toray, and Suominen (Helsinki). Much of the industry is private or private-equity-owned (Freudenberg, Fitesa, Ahlstrom, Alkegen, Hollingsworth & Vose). There is no dedicated nonwovens exchange-traded fund (ETF). The full company table — tickers, scale, and private owners — is in the child primer.

5. How the money works

A nonwoven mill is a spread-and-utilization machine. Raw material (polypropylene or polyester resin, viscose, or wood pulp) is the biggest cost — often 60–70% of the total — and owners earn the difference between fabric price and resin cost, usually re-indexed to polymer benchmarks through resin pass-through clauses that adjust with a lag.[10] Because a line's cost is mostly fixed (depreciation, energy, 24/7 staffing), profitability hinges on running near full capacity; this is a business of operating leverage where small swings in volume or price move margins a lot.[1] Product mix is the strategic lever: commodity polypropylene hygiene fabric earns a gross margin around 25%, while specialty grades (medical barrier, high-efficiency filtration media, flashspun Tyvek) command far more.[10] Margins are thin at the commodity end — the pure-play leader ran an ~11% EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) margin in FY2025; Magnera's largest customer represented approximately 14% of fiscal 2025 sales, and its ten largest represented approximately 42%, illustrating the buyer power that structurally caps supplier margins.[7][11] The child primer works this through in detail.

6. Demand drivers

The same drivers apply to the whole level, since it is one industry. In 2022, durable end uses represented 51% of North American production by tonnes and disposable uses 49%.[5] Key segments include: hygiene (~32% of demand — diapers, feminine care, and the aging-population tailwind of adult incontinence);[12] wipes (baby, personal-care, disinfecting — the U.S. moist-toilet-tissue category expanded rapidly in 2025);[13] medical (gowns, drapes, masks, plus PPE-reshoring policy); filtration (air, liquid, industrial — a bright secular pocket boosted by cleanroom, data-center, and indoor-air-quality demand); automotive interior components; and construction/geosynthetics (house wrap, roofing mats, and geotextiles leveraged to housing starts and federal infrastructure spending).[14] Baby diapers face a demographic headwind from falling U.S. birth rates — the final 2024 total fertility rate was a record-low 1,599.5 births per 1,000 women — partly offset by premiumization.[15] The U.S. market is mature and grows in the low single digits.

7. Regulation

Nonwovens are lightly regulated as a material but heavily governed at the end-use. Medical gowns and drapes are U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Class II devices; N95 respirators require National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) certification.[16] Flushable wipes are shaped by INDA (Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry) GD4 flushability guidelines and, at the federal level, the WIPPES Act (Wastewater Infrastructure Pollution Prevention and Environmental Safety Act) national "Do Not Flush" labeling standard, which as of mid-2026 is at or near enactment.[17][18] Geotextiles follow transportation specs (AASHTO M288); building products fall under ICC codes. Broad environmental pressures — microplastics, single-use-plastics scrutiny, and PFAS ("forever chemicals") phase-outs — shape the regulatory outlook; EPA's Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines explicitly include nonwoven textile products, and the agency is collecting additional information on possible PFAS discharges.[19] Import tariffs round out the picture. Full detail is in the child primer.

8. Consolidation

The commodity end is consolidating around scale while the specialty end stays fragmented. The headline event: in November 2024 Berry Global spun its nonwovens and films business into a merger with Glatfelter to create Magnera, instantly the world's largest nonwovens producer; in April 2025 Amcor acquired the remaining Berry Global for about $10.4 billion in stock.[20][21] In Europe, Ahlstrom and Munksjö merged and were taken private by Bain Capital; in the U.S., Lydall and Unifrax combined to form Alkegen. Even so, the merchant market remains only moderately concentrated (top-four share ~26.5%),[4] and large buyers (Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Unicharm) wield purchasing power that structurally caps supplier margins.

9. Risks

The level's risks are the child's risks: spread compression when resin prices outrun pass-throughs; overcapacity and imports (the post-COVID meltblown glut — global volume fell from a ~368,000-tonne 2020 peak to ~254,000 tonnes by 2023 — is the cautionary tale, compounded by low-cost Chinese capacity);[22][23] cyclicality in construction, automotive, and industrial end-markets; a demographic headwind from falling U.S. birth rates on diaper volumes; customer concentration and insourcing; regulatory/ESG pressure on single-use plastics; leverage on merger-heavy balance sheets (Magnera posted a net loss in FY2025);[7] and labor and safety — while labor is not the largest input, specialized operators and technicians are difficult to replace, and BLS reported a 2024 recordable injury and illness rate of 2.2 cases per 100 full-time workers for nonwoven fabric mills.[24]

10. How to invest and outlook

Public route: the only U.S.-listed pure play is Magnera (MAGN) — a small-cap, leveraged, cyclical turnaround levered to nonwoven spreads and utilization — with diluted exposure available through diversified names (MATV, DD, KMB, PG, AMCR, OC, BRK.B) and international listings (Indorama/Avgol; Toray; Suominen, Helsinki). No nonwovens ETF exists, so index exposure is indirect via materials and consumer-staples funds. Private route: most of the industry is private or private-equity-owned; direct entry means buying or building a specialty mill, where returns cluster in niches (filtration, medical barrier, high-temperature) rather than commodity hygiene, given ~$30–50 million per line and thin commodity economics.[1] Outlook: low-single-digit U.S. volume growth, mid-single-digit global value growth,[6] with the brighter pockets in adult incontinence, filtration, medical/PPE reshoring, and infrastructure geotextiles; INDA reported that recent North American line additions were increasingly directed toward longer-life applications, rather than exclusively disposable hygiene.[2] Sustainability is becoming both a differentiator and a regulatory axis. Because 31323 is a single-child industry, this outlook and the child's are one and the same — see the 313230 primer for the company-level detail behind these judgments.

---

Sources

Drawn from the child primer (313230); federal figures verified against our ingested ground-truth stats for NAICS 31323.

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 313230 / 31323 (establishments, employment, payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. INDA (Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry), "2025 INDA Supply Report — North American Nonwovens Industry," May 2025. https://www.inda.org/2025-inda-supply-report-shows-north-american-nonwovens-industrys-continued-growth-with-a-focus-on-sustainability/
3. EDANA, "How are nonwovens made?" (process definitions). https://www.edana.org/nw-related-industry/how-are-nonwovens-made
4. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration Ratios and Receipts, NAICS 313230 / 31323. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
5. INDA, "2022 Supply Report Executive Summary" (North American capacity, trade data, yield factors). https://www.inda.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Annual22.ExecutiveSummary.pdf
6. Verified Market Research, "Non-Woven Fabric Market Size, Growth, Trends & Forecast (2025–2033)," 2025. https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/product/non-woven-fabric-market/
7. Magnera Corporation, "Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results," 2025 (SEC Form 8-K / investor relations). https://ir.magnera.com/news-releases/news-release-details/magnera-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-results
8. Mativ Holdings, Form 10-K (Fiscal Year 2025). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1000623/000100062326000016/matv-20251231.htm
9. GlobeNewswire, "World Nonwovens Industry Top Ten Producers Review 2024," October 29, 2024. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/10/29/2970890/28124/en/World-Nonwovens-Industry-Top-Ten-Producers-Review-2024.html
10. Mordor Intelligence / Grand View Research, "Polypropylene Non-woven Fabric Market" and nonwoven production-cost economics, 2024–2025. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/polypropylene-non-woven-fabric-market
11. Magnera Corporation, Form 10-K (Fiscal Year 2025). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/41719/000004171925000110/form10k.htm
12. Grand View Research / MarketsandMarkets, "Nonwoven Fabrics Market — end-use shares (hygiene ~32%)," 2024–2025. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/non-woven-fabrics-market-101727296.html
13. Suominen Corporation, "Annual Report 2025" and "President & CEO's Review of the Year 2025." https://www.suominen.fi/newsroom/2026/suominen-has-published-its-annual-report-2025/
14. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (2023), NAICS 313230. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
15. CDC National Center for Health Statistics, "Births: Final Data for 2024," National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 75, No. 2, 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr75/nvsr75-02.pdf
16. U.S. FDA, "Medical Gowns" (guidance and classification). https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/personal-protective-equipment-infection-control/medical-gowns
17. INDA, "Guidelines for Assessing the Flushability of Disposable Nonwoven Products (Edition 4 / GD4)" and Wipes Policy. https://www.inda.org/issues-advocacy/inda-advocacy-center/wipes-policy/
18. U.S. Congress, "WIPPES Act (H.R.2269 / S.1092)," 119th Congress, 2025–2026. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2269
19. U.S. EPA, "Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines." https://www.epa.gov/eg/textile-mills-effluent-guidelines
20. GlobeNewswire / Magnera, "Magnera Emerges as a New Global Leader… Following the Merger of Berry's Health, Hygiene and Specialties Global Nonwovens and Films Business with Glatfelter," November 4, 2024. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/11/04/2974509/0/en/Magnera-Emerges-as-a-New-Global-Leader-in-the-Specialty-Materials-and-Nonwovens-Industry.html
21. Amcor plc, "Amcor completes combination with Berry Global," April 30, 2025. https://www.amcor.com/media/news/amcor-completes-combination-with-berry-global
22. Smithers / Nonwovens News, "US$1bn meltblown industry faces period of readjustment," 2023. https://www.nonwovensnews.com/manufacturing-news/16332-us-1b-meltblown-industry-faces-period-of-readjustment
23. Nonwovens Industry, "Meltblown Faces Challenges," March 2024. https://www.nonwovens-industry.com/issues/2024-03-01/view_features/meltblown-faces-challenges/
24. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Industry Injury and Illness Data — 2024" (Table 1). https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national.htm