It's clear that WestRock is a great company with 50,000 dedicated employees who work tremendously hard every day.
In the quarter, sales of $5.1 billion were up 14% year over year.
Adjusted segment EBITDA also improved significantly, rising to $878 million or 22% year over year, and adjusted earnings per share of $1.23 increased 68% compared to prior year.
Packaging sales increased by 8% year over year, driven by the implementation of price increases across our business.
Packaging volumes were down 1.6% year over year, with box volumes down 1%.
Paper volumes increased 13% year over year on strong demand across all grades.
Our Corrugated adjusted segment EBITDA margins of 18.4% increased sequentially and year over year.
The Brazil business generated 35% EBITDA margins driven by strong demand and the positive impact of the ramp-up of our Tres Barras Mill after the completion of the expansion project.
Our Consumer Packaging segment performed very well with adjusted segment EBITDA margins of 15.9%, up 220 basis points from prior year and 40 basis points sequentially.
Overall, WestRock adjusted segment EBITDA margins of 17.2% were up 110 basis points versus prior year and 40 basis points sequentially.
This adjusted segment EBITDA includes $5 million of proceeds from business interruption insurance.
In the quarter, we generated adjusted free cash flow of $372 million.
As part of our balanced capital allocation strategy, we repurchased $122 million of stock and redeemed $400 million of bonds that would have matured in March 2022.
Net sales for the year increased to $18.7 billion, and we reported adjusted segment EBITDA of $3 billion.
Net sales and adjusted segment EBITDA were both up an impressive 7% year over year.
Adjusted earnings per share of $3.39 was up 23%, and we generated record adjusted free cash flow of $1.5 billion.
We also hit our net leverage target of two and a quarter times to two and a half times ending the year at 2.38 times.
Our innovation pipeline continues to grow, and we have reached an annual run rate of more than $280 million of sales from plastic replacement opportunities.
We generated $1.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow in fiscal 2021, the sixth straight year that WestRock has generated more than $1 billion in free cash flow.
During fiscal 2021, we invested $816 million into our business through capital investments that maintained our assets and support our growth in the future.
Given our consistent cash flow generation over multiple business cycles, we increased our dividend, raising it 20% in May, and then again, as announced in October, for a total increase of 25% since February.
We further strengthened our balance sheet as we reduced adjusted net debt by $1.3 billion to $7.7 billion and returned to our targeted leverage ratio.
We repurchased $122 million of stock or 2.4 million shares.
This channel makes up approximately 13% of our packaging volume, and our e-commerce remains a key driver of overall box demand.
Sales to the beauty and healthcare markets are 12% of our packaging volume.
And these are just a few examples that have generated our current $280 million run rate of incremental sales from plastics replacement.
We continue to believe this opportunity is in excess of $500 million incremental sales annually.
We also won 12 additional awards for sustainability, innovation and design.
This commodity cost inflation combined with our seasonal increase in healthcare cost is forecasted to be approximately $100 million higher than the fourth quarter.
And due to delays in mill maintenance earlier in fiscal 2021, along with our originally planned outages, we have approximately 200,000 tons of scheduled downtime across our system that will negatively impact earnings by approximately $75 million.
We have 10 major mill maintenance outages in the first fiscal quarter, one of the largest amounts in one quarter in WestRock's history.
These assumptions, combined with three fewer shipping days and the normal seasonality in our consumer business, results in forecasted adjusted segment EBITDA of $660 million to $700 million and adjusted earnings per share of $0.56 to $0.67 per share.
Our planned mill maintenance outage schedule declines throughout the fiscal year, but will still be approximately 100,000 tons higher than in fiscal 2021.
Given these assumptions, we forecast adjusted segment EBITDA to be in the range of $3.3 billion to $3.7 billion.
As CFO, Ward has been instrumental in the growth and development of our company, overseeing more than 20 mergers and acquisitions, including the merger of MeadWestvaco and RockTenn, the spinoff of Ingevity, the sale of our Home, Health and Beauty Plastics business, and the disposition of our land and development business.

Summary:
In the quarter, sales of $5.1 billion were up 14% year over year.
Adjusted segment EBITDA also improved significantly, rising to $878 million or 22% year over year, and adjusted earnings per share of $1.23 increased 68% compared to prior year.