Monthly Archives: October 2024

Mongabay: New survey puts human face on pollution caused by U.S. wood pellet mills

A drone photo shows how close some residents in Gloster, Mississippi, live to the Drax Amite plant, which produces up to 525 million metric tons of wood pellets annually. Image by Nico Hopkins.

Covering an issue such as forest biomass for energy for as long as I have enables me to connect the dots with previous coverage. Earlier this year, I wrote two stories that connect to this one here.

The first in January discussed a new study that specifically identified the kind of air pollution produced by wood pellet plants and also how dangerous that pollution is to public health. The other a few months later described how forest campaigners had hosted Biden Administration officials at wood pellet plants in North and South Carolina to hear from community members whose lives are adversely effected by living near the plants.

This story connects those dots. A coalition of environmental and social justice groups combined to survey more than 300 households within a two-mile radius of five pellet mills in the U.S. Southeast to ask a series of questions. The result is what I describe as “a collective personal story of diminished quality of life and degraded health suffered by residents living near the mills.”

“I used to walk around a lot but stopped once the mill [opened],” a resident living near the Drax Amite plant in Mississippi told coalition interviewers. “I was recently given an asthma pump for breathing problems.” A resident near the Enviva Sampson plant said: “My eyes burn. I have mucus in my throat every morning when I wake up.”

In every story I write on this issue, I reach out to biomass industry spokespeople for a response. Typically, I don’t hear back. This time, I’m pleased to note, I received a response from both an industry trade group and a Drax spokesperson — both of whom discounted the survey and claimed they take the health of people in the communities in which they operate very seriously.

In this story, I also got my first opportunity to interview the Rev. Leo Woodberry of South Carolina, a longtime civil rights advocate now pushing back against what he sees as the public health hazards posed by pellet mills in the mostly poor, rural and minority places — environmental justice communities — in which they operate.

The Rev. Leo Woodberry of Florence, South Carolina, has been raising awareness for years about quality of life and health problems he says are related to the wood pellet mills in the rural parts of his state. He is shown here in the community forest in Britton’s Neck, South Carolina. Image courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

Mongabay: Delay of EU Deforestation Regulation may ‘be excuse to gut law,’ activists fear

Deforestation for an oil palm plantation in Sumatra. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

In June 2023, the European Union passed a law designed to reduced deforestation and forest degradation around the world caused by the commodities the member states import: coffee, soy, cattle, cocoa, palm oil, rubber and wood, included industrial-scale wood pellets. The law was to go into effect on January 1, 2025. My story covers a surprise decision by the European Commission, which makes legislative recommendations to the European Parliament, to delay the implementation of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) for 12 months.

Since the law was passed, a host of industries and countries, including the United States, have pushed back hard against the regulations, calling them onerous and demanding more time for implementation. The forest biomass industry, for example, wanted a 24-month delay. Forest advocates in the US and EU all decried the delay, as my story describes.

“I think the biggest threat from a delay is that it’s an excuse to gut the law by giving more time to already aggressive industry opposition,” Heather Hillaker, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in North Carolina, told me, summarizing the general concern of her international colleagues. “With climate change, every month matters when we’re trying to avoid [carbon] emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.”

Meanwhile, Austrian Christian Rakos, president of the World Bioenergy Association, wrote me in an email: “The traceability [requirement in the EUDR] is extremely difficult for sawmill byproducts which make up for more than half of U.S. pellet production. If sawdust is collected from several sawmills and then pelletized, how will you be able to tell from which forest plot pellets come? And what is the benefit of knowing if there is no deforestation in the entire fibre basket?”

Rakos and I met at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 and talked for two hours. His defense of the wood pellet industry is vigorous and, I believe, genuine. But I have seen from my own observations in North Carolina, and from the only source from within the industry to ever go public, that wood pellets are manufactured almost entirely by whole trees from native forests, not waste and residue, and that daily harvests for the 26 pellet mills in the US Southeast are effectively degrading intact forests and contributing to deforestation.

The Edenton, North Carolina, clear-cut. The biggest trees were harvested as timber, while other whole trees were chipped and trucked to an Enviva pellet mill, likely for export to Europe. Precisely how the EUDR will impact the forest biomass industry remains to be seen, though it asked the EU for a 24-month delay. Image courtesy of Bobby Amoroso.