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

Forest biomass companies working in the U.S. Southeast in 2023 produced 9.54 million metric tons of wood pellets for export at their 28 mills scattered across the region. That’s a 5.7% increase over 2022. And there’s no end in sight for the sector’s growth — with new U.S. mills planned for the Deep South and even California.

While the pellets are an environmentally controversial substitute for coal burned in overseas power plants, awareness is also growing that biomass manufacture poses a public health threat in the mostly poor, rural, minority U.S. communities where the mills operate within a 10-state arc stretching from southern Virginia to Louisiana.

A 2023 study, for example, found that wood pellet mills emit 2.8 times more pollution than coal and oil-burning power plants on average. The mills emit 55 toxic pollutants ranging from nitrogen oxide to volatile organic compounds that disproportionately impact so-called environmental justice communities.

Now, a first-of-its-kind survey of 312 households in five of those communities tells a collective personal story of diminished quality of life and degraded health suffered by residents living near the mills.

The door-to-door survey was conducted by a coalition of NGOs that included the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the Dogwood Alliance and other forest protection organizations, along with community groups such as the People’s Justice Council and the Environmental Justice Action Research Clinic.

“The results of this groundbreaking survey confirm what we have known for years: Biomass wood pellet plants do incredible amounts of harm to nearby communities,” said Jasmine Washington, a SELC attorney who interviewed North Carolina residents. “Families shouldn’t have to live in fear of what pellet plants are pumping into the air next door.”

The coalition interviewed residents (70% of whom identified as Black) within two miles of two Enviva plants in North Carolina and one in South Carolina, and two Drax mills in Alabama and Mississippi. Maryland-based Enviva and United Kingdom-based Drax are two of the world’s largest producers of wood pellets for industrial-scale burning at power plants in European Union nations, the U.K., Japan and South Korea.

All these nations offer large government subsidies to pellet companies allowed by flawed policies claiming zero carbon emissions for biomass energy where pellets are burned.

The U.S. Industrial Pellet Association (USIPA) dismissed the new survey’s findings in its response to Mongabay, writing, that their corporate “members will continue to work closely with local communities to address concerns and maintain positive contributions to the economy and the well-being of their neighbors.”

Among the results: In four of the five surveyed communities, 86% of households reported at least one family member with a disease or ailments (including asthma or irritated eyes, sinuses and throats) associated with or made worse by pellet mill pollution.

More than 65% of households within a half-mile of a mill complained of daily wood dust and noise pollution, and continuous traffic by large trucks hauling whole or shredded trees. For those living 2 miles away, 41% of households had similar complaints. Exposure to dust and other small particulates has been linked in numerous studies to aggravated asthma, decreased lung function and even premature death in people with heart or lung disease, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Of 312 total respondents, just 16, or 5%, cited economic benefits of having the giant mills in their communities (because they offer working-class jobs or provide donations to local organizations), while 71, or 23%, said they saw no economic benefits at all.

SELC’s Washington said the survey data are important because, while some residents have complained to local governments about the pellet mills, those individual complaints are mostly ignored and dismissed as they may not be related to the mills.

“Our top goal all along was to provide quantitative data to support the lived experiences and quality of life impacts from the pellet mill industry,” Washington said.

“I used to walk around a lot but stopped once the mill [opened],” a resident living near the Drax Amite plant in Mississippi told 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.”

The Rev. Leo Woodberry, pastor of the Kingdom Living Temple in Florence, South Carolina, lives near a wood pellet mill, and within two hours of Enviva’s Greenwood plant where residents were surveyed; he has also been a civil rights and environmental activist for more than 30 years. Though he wasn’t involved in the survey, he enumerated the costs of the biomass industry to the region:

“[W]hen you look at the total impacts — emissions from the trucks, the creation of heat islands from clearcut logging in the counties, increased flooding because of a loss of tree cover, the respiratory problems from dust and pollution, you’re looking at millions of dollars in damages in these environmental justice communities,” Woodberry told Mongabay.

Pellet industry pollution isn’t only a U.S. problem; it also raises serious public health concerns at the other end of the supply chain where wood pellets are burned in the European Union, Indonesia and elsewhere.

In a written statement to Mongabay, USIPA disparaged the survey methods and results as representing the biased effort of its environmental critics.

“The health and safety of local communities is of utmost importance to USIPA members [which includes Enviva and Drax]. While individual concerns are taken seriously and investigated, anecdotal reports conducted by opposition groups are unreliable and prone to incorrect conclusions because they lack proper design, academic rigor, and standards,” the statement noted.

“In particular, the recent community survey from the Southern Environmental Law Center demonstrates many of these errors. It does not control for the co-location of other industrial sites near pellet facilities, is based on a non-representative sample size, and purposefully targets communities where opposition groups have built their strongest relationships.”

Enviva, mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, did not respond to a request for comment. But Michelli Martin, a Drax spokesperson, sent an email response to Mongabay listing the company’s efforts to reduce pollution at its Deep South plants: “Since 2022, we have invested $140 million in improving and enhancing our North American plants. And by the end of 2024, we plan on investing a further $40 million on additional improvements.”

Martin added that since 2021, Drax has partnered with regulatory agencies at its Mississippi plant (where nearby community members were surveyed), “to establish best environmental practices,” which include pollution controls to limit the release of volatile organic compounds and other toxic contaminants.

Notably, these actions came after Drax was sued for $2.5 million by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for violating state air quality standards in 2020 by emitting a wide range of harmful pollutants. The DEQ notified Drax again in June 2023 that it still was not in compliance.

The recent emphasis on pellet mill public health impacts by industry opponents suggests a shift in forest activist strategy. For the better part of a decade, forest campaigners, citing scientific research, have argued that tree harvesting for pellet production contributes to deforestation and diminishes biodiversity, while the burning of wood in power plants creates more heat-trapping emissions than coal to produce the same amount of energy.

Those earlier arguments are slowly raising public awareness in Europe and Japan. But this science-based lobbying has not resulted in policy changes to slow the demand for forest bioenergy or the growth of pellet makers such as Drax; the company is seeking to build two pellet mills in California, likely to meet increasing demand in Japan and South Korea.

Enviva and Drax are also both seeking U.S. tax credits and tax subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act by claiming forest biomass as a renewable energy solution. But several U.S. House members, as well as U.S. Senators Corey Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have spoken out against taxpayer support for the pellet industry, citing mostly public health concerns in poor communities.

In South Carolina, Woodberry, the pastor, said the wood pellet industry’s words and actions all sound familiar.

“They are following the model that’s been in place since the industrial age: You set up shop in communities that are cared about the least — marginalized communities when it comes to race, power and money,” he said. “They are purposely targeting the most vulnerable communities to make money. And it’s just horrendous.”

Banner image: Greater Greener Gloster community members stand in front of the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, as they demand the cleanup of the Drax pellet mill in their community and an end to biomass industry subsidies. Image courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

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