During a visit to Canton Tuesday, May 2, N.C. Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Elizabeth Biser met with a room full of leaders in local government, business and education. They held a wide-ranging conversation about the ongoing response to the impending closure of Canton’s 115-year-old paper mill — and Biser made it clear that she intends to hold Pactiv Evergreen accountable for cleaning up any messes left behind.
“We will hold the company accountable for responsible closure, and Pactiv, I’ll say I appreciate you all being here today,” she said. “I appreciate working with you all. We all also expect you to do the right thing as we’re going through this closure. We are going to use all of our authority and available resources to do a full assessment, and make sure that we totally understand what the environmental legacy and impacts are at the site.”
Coming to such an understanding will take time. The mill has been in operation since 1908, well before environmental laws existed. Multiple rounds of testing and ongoing monitoring will be necessary to determine what remediation is needed once production stops. The mill is not a Superfund site, but that could change — in answer to a question about that possibility, Bissel said it would be “premature” to get into a Superfund discussion.
The list of to-dos is a long one, but first on the agenda is dealing with two ongoing issues on the site — black liquor seeps and a fuel oil release.
“There’s a lot to be worked out, and one of the things we’re committed to is continuing that open communication with DWR [Division of Water Resources] and all the other folks at the division,” said Fern Paterson, associate general counsel for Pactiv Evergreen, adding, “Whatever’s decided, we want to make sure we’re doing that in full cooperation with the town, in full cooperation with DWR, and that we’re doing it in the right way and making sure we’re property permitted and maintaining compliance throughout the process.”
In April, the DEQ performed initial tests sampling the town influent sewer and landfill leachate. The goal of those tests, said Landon Davidson, water quality supervisor for the Asheville Regional Office, was to determine the strength and chemistry of the wastewater. The results revealed “fairly standard to slightly weak” wastewater, meaning that there’s no reason why the system can’t appropriately treat those two waste streams.
Wastewater was a big topic of discussion at the meeting, because the mill treats Canton’s municipal sewage. A 1960s-era agreement stipulates that the mill must continue to do so for at least two years should it ever close, but designing, permitting and building a new treatment plant takes more like five to seven years.
“One of my key goals is to explore how to extend that agreement,” Davidson said.
It would likely be a $35-$40 million project, said Town Manager Nick Scheuer, a challenging task for a town with an $11 million annual operation budget — and that’s before the mill shutdown takes a bite out of that revenue.
Davidson said his office is also looking at the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit governing the mill’s wastewater treatment plant discharge to see if the rules of that permit could extend the two-year timeframe.
“They have to comply with the permit until it’s modified or changed in some way, or the ownership changes,” he said. “And that can only really occur with the approval of the Division [of Water Resources].”
While much of the conversation focused on the environmental regulation aspects Biser’s office deals with, economic concerns were also front and center. Haywood County Community and Economic Development Director David Francis said an estimated 83-85% of the mill’s employees live in Haywood County, and that the closure could well prove devastating to the western region’s timber industry. He cited a recent meeting with the N.C. Forestry Association in which it was stated the impacts could exceed 4,000 employees across the region. In Haywood County alone, Francis said, the mill closure will have an economic impact of $800 million to $1 billion.
“This is going to impact Haywood County far greater than I think we even first imagined,” he said.
Kaleb Rathbone, assistant commissioner of agriculture for Western North Carolina, pointed out that logging and timber production are capital-intensive industries — those businesses can’t survive for six months without a market. There will be a need for creativity to seek out alternate markets for wood chips and wood products from Western North Carolina.
“I don’t think I’m overstating this when I say that this region has never had a timber industry without the paper mill,” he said. “We don’t know what that looks like, but we do know that it’s very important that we maintain and preserve that industry.”
The issues are many, and still emerging as the process goes on. Biser stressed that the May 2 meeting was “the first stop, not the stop.”
“I know that this news is devastating, and my heart is with the all the families who are impacted throughout this community, whether they’re affected by job loss or by the economic loss of the region,” she said. “I know it’s significant. And know that first and foremost, that we are here with you.”