“It was devastating,” said the town's mayor, Jerry Norwood. “We went on life support at that point.”

The mill closing meant the loss of 400 jobs, Norwood said, making it by far the top employer in a town of just 900 people. Despite being the mayor, Norwood knows how hard it is to find work close by. His last gig was at a chemical plant in Geismer, Louisiana, a three-hour round trip from his Gloster home.

“The workforce is probably the biggest obstacle (to attracting new industry),” Norwood told Mississippi Today. “We don't have enough people to fill those (skilled) positions, electricians and stuff like that. And we don't have a school here in Gloster. The school closed in 1989. People don't want to move in here if their kids can't get a quality education.”

In the last decade, towns like Gloster turned to what they saw as a new hope: the emerging wood pellet industry. While the industry is now grappling with a variety of environmental objections, the state and local governments have invested millions of dollars in wood pellets, through tax exemptions and other incentives, in an attempt to stem rural disinvestment.

In 2022, the world's largest wood pellet producer came to another Mississippi town, Lucedale, 160 miles east of Gloster. The town was in a similar economic predicament: Census numbers show just 29% of working-age residents there are employed, compared to 60% on the national level, and over a third of the town lives below the poverty line. 

So when George County's economic development director, Ken Flanagan, learned that the company, called Enviva, was bringing one of the largest new wood pellet operations in the world to Lucedale, he took a moment to let it sink in. 

“I never really had that, you know, winning the national championship moment where you get the trophy and jump around,” Flanagan said. “It was just a big sigh of relief.”

Lucedale beat out a number of other places chomping at the bit to house the new plant, he said, with some offering as much as 95% off the company's tax bill. 

Enviva brought with it 103 full-time positions and 200 more contracting jobs, something to behold for a place with just under 700 working residents. While Lucedale is a small town, it's in the heart of one of the top timber-producing regions of the world, known as America's “wood basket,” which made it an ideal spot for a company like Enviva.

Since opening about two years ago, the impact of Enviva has transpired as Flanagan hoped: Most of the jobs have gone to local residents, he said, and even with a two-thirds tax discount the county gave up, Enviva still paid $1 million in revenue last year. 

“The fact that we were able to bring timber back to George County, we knew early on that this is going to be a big, big, deal,” he said.

Excited by the economic promise of the wood pellet world, and what it could mean to struggling rural areas, Mississippi officials have agreed to give companies like Enviva over $24 million in incentives over the last decade – a figure that's likely much higher due to unquantified tax exemptions. 

But in the process, the wood pellet industry has turned parts of rural Mississippi into venues for a climate and public health debate that's traversing the globe, one that people in Gloster are all too familiar with. 

The company was in the middle of an impressive fiscal performance: In 2023, Drax posted $1.5 billion in profits, on top of billions in subsidies from the British government.

In recent years, countries in Europe and Asia have gradually injected wood pellets into their energy portfolios as a way of meeting their carbon reduction goals. The trend is based on the belief, which was laid out in the European Union's 2009 renewable energy directive, that burning wood instead of coal will help reduce emissions.

With a growing global demand for wood pellets, Drax and Enviva have expanded operations in forest-abundant regions like the Southeast. And in Mississippi, the industry has found one of its most eager suitors.

The Lucedale plant, for instance, was widely touted as the largest wood pellet operation in the world when it opened in 2022. To lure Enviva there, the state and county governments committed an estimated $20 million in grants and tax breaks, public records show. Enviva almost raked in another $46 million in state and local incentives for a new Mississippi plant, the Stone County Enterprise reported. But financial struggles have put the new project on hold as Enviva recently declared Chapter 11 Bankruptcy to reorganize its debts. It's stock price as of Friday stood at 42 cents per share.

Overall, as of 2023, Mississippi had permitted production of over 2 million tons of pellets per year. In the South, where most American pellets come from, only one other state – North Carolina – had more capacity. 

But last year at Drax's shareholders meeting in London, Martin had traveled to tell everyone about what's gone wrong with the wood pellet business. During a Q&A portion of the meeting, she grabbed the microphone and addressed the companies' leaders.

“We have become a sacrifice zone, and we feel like you don't care about us as people,” she said, choking up as she spoke. “You are willing to pollute our community and extract our natural resources for your own economic gain. So I came all this way from Gloster, Mississippi, to ask you: What role are you prepared to play in addressing the health issues and air pollution that you continue to inflict in our community?”

It didn't start out bad. When Drax's facility opened in 2016, Gloster residents were pleased to see a new job creator come to town. 

“When you're a small rural community, and they announce a business is coming, most people get excited,” Martin recalled to Mississippi Today. 

State officials were excited about it, too. Then-Gov. Phil Bryant even shouted out the new wood pellet plant in one of his State of the State speeches. To bring Drax to Gloster, Mississippi shelled out $2.8 million in grants, in addition to several tax exemptions, which include: full, 10-year corporate income and corporate franchise tax exemptions, as well as a 10-year sales and use tax exemption estimated at about $1.5 million, according to the Mississippi Development Authority. The company also received a 10-year local property tax exemption.

Due to confidentiality laws protecting taxpayers, Mississippi Today couldn't accurately quantify the full value of those exemptions. For reference, though, Drax estimates it contributed $5 million in state and local revenue in 2023 alone, even with those incentives.

The local revenue has allowed the city to keep utility rates low, Norwood said, emphasizing the importance of making services affordable in a place with a high poverty rate. 

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“Thank God for Drax, we have money in those departments where we can do that,” he said.

Drax's overall economic impact to Amite County, where Gloster is, was $160 million in 2023, company spokesperson Michelli Martin told Mississippi Today. 

But it's the facility's environmental impact that has drawn more attention. 

In 2018, Drax alerted the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality that it had underestimated its release of toxic chemicals called Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, since the plant opened in 2016, and was over three times the legal limit. It wasn't until 2021, almost five years after the releases began, that Drax finally came into compliance over its VOC emissions. In 2020, MDEQ fined the facility $2.5 million, one of the largest Clean Air Act penalties in state history.

Shortly after, Drax slipped up again. Testing from 2022 showed that Amite BioEnergy, the name of the Gloster facility, was releasing 50% over its permitted limit of another, more dangerous group of chemicals called Hazardous Air Pollutants, or HAPs. MDEQ cited Drax for a violation in 2023, and is now negotiating a new penalty with the company. 

The company also miscalculated its emissions from two wood pellet plants in Louisiana, for which the state fined Drax $3.2 million in 2022. Throughout the Southeast, regulators have fined wood pellet facilities 14 times for air emission violations since 2012, totaling $6.6 million in penalties. 

Krystal Martin and other residents were quick to connect Drax's violations to health issues among those living near the plant. Martin's mom, for instance, had just started going to the hospital in 2020 for an array of respiratory issues when they heard about the $2.5 million fine. 

Another resident, Shelia Dobbins, lived about a half mile from the plant until 2022. Dobbins told Mississippi Today that in 2017, she fainted during a doctor's visit. After an extended hospital stay, doctors diagnosed her with COPD, and since then Dobbins has had to carry an oxygen tank with her wherever she goes. In the years after, she's watched as similar symptoms have plagued her family and neighbors.

“I'm on oxygen… my husband was on oxygen, he's deceased. My brother-in-law was on oxygen, he's deceased. My sister is on oxygen right now. All these houses are right there together, around that plant,” she said.  “They need to own up to what they did.”

Three other residents who have lived near the plant told Mississippi Today they've also experienced respiratory issues since Drax arrived, and Martin said there were many more.

No conclusive evidence exists connecting Drax's emissions to any of the aforementioned health symptoms. Norwood, the town's mayor, was dubious aout the plant having anything to do with the health issues. MDEQ Executive Director Chris Wells told Mississippi Today that, just because Drax violated air emissions limits, doesn't mean the company has harmed the public's health. 

“God sees all sin the same,” Wells said. “In the environmental regulatory world, there are gradients of sin … I know that some of the folks in the Gloster community have expressed concerns about their health, and I understand why. What we've tried to tell them is, they are equating a violation with a health impact. I'm not saying there hasn't been. What I told them is that we haven't seen any evidence of that.”

Connecting any health symptoms to any one source of pollution is a tall order. But Erica Walker, a Jackson native who teaches epidemiology at Brown University, believes her ongoing research will determine if there is such a connection. 

Last August, Walker set up air monitors at different homes around Gloster to collect air quality levels. The preliminary data, she said, shows daily averages below federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. But those averages, Walker added, mask a worrisome trend: At night, when most people are home and near the air monitors, the pollutant levels are “magnitudes” higher than EPA standards. 

Walker also pointed to high levels of “noise pollution” that come from the plant, which operates through the night. Irritation from loud noises can build stress, she explained, which over time can increase a person's risk of symptoms like cardiovascular diseases.

“A hundred percent of the people we've talked to in Gloster have expressed that (the noise) is something they can't control,” she said. “They hear it all the time, at random times of night. Even people that live a distance away from (the plant).” 

Walker said it won't be until August, when she'll have a year's worth of data, before she can officially compare her measurements to EPA standards and then start to narrow down the possible causes of residents' health issues. 

But regardless of whether Drax is at the root of those issues, Walker said it's a huge concern that officials allowed a wood pellet facility, which are known to release toxic chemicals harmful to residents, to be built so close to residents in an area with already poor health outcomes like Gloster.

“We want to make sure we aren't additionally burdening already burdened communities,” Walker said. “When I first went to Gloster and saw where the wood pellet plant was, like literally in the middle of the community, like a real blastoma in the middle of this community that expanded, I was like, ‘Who approved this?'

“There are people that live right around (the Drax plant). If we would've taken seriously the environmental justice philosophy, I don't even think that plant would have been approved. I can just say that plant would not be approved to go sit in Fondren, or the nice fancy part of Madison.”

When asked about the company's emission violations, Drax reiterates it was the one to tell MDEQ it was out of compliance. 

“What the news articles that covered this don't mention is that the emissions matter discussed is a direct result of how we continually monitor operations to ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements,” Martin, the company's spokesperson, said in an email. “The potential issue was identified by Drax through our own on-site monitoring, and we shared the data with the (MDEQ) to proactively address it. Moreover, Drax is constantly evaluating new ways to enhance our operations as technology and best industry practices evolve over time.”  

But the immediate impacts from emissions are only part of the environmental debate going on around wood pellets. More and more, scientists are questioning the very premise that the industry was born out of.

When accounting for the loss of trees that sequester carbon naturally, wood pellet production actually increases the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Carr said. 

“Most of those studies show that, for the next three decades to 100 years, you're going to have more carbon in the atmosphere from burning trees than if you just continue burning fossil fuels,” he said, citing a study the center commissioned looking specifically at Drax's plants in Mississippi and Louisiana. “The reason is that you're cutting down trees that are currently storing carbon, and you're putting that carbon immediately into the atmosphere. You're not going to recapture that carbon until they grow back to an equal level of carbon storage.”  

A 2018 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made the same conclusion. 

Part of the discrepancy between skeptics and those in the industry is over what kind of wood gets used for pellets. Companies like Drax and Enviva maintain their pellets come largely from leftover wood that other businesses, like sawmills, can't use, as well as from thinnings, which is when a forester removes smaller trees to let larger ones grow.

But in a letter to President Biden and other leaders in 2021, over 500 scientists from around the world argued that even using the “low-grade” wood those companies rely on creates a “carbon debt.”

“Regrowing trees and displacement of fossil fuels may eventually pay off this carbon debt, but regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change,” the letter reads. “As numerous studies have shown, this burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas.”

It's unclear what the growing public opinion against wood pellets means for its future in Mississippi. It's especially unclear for Enviva after its recent bankruptcy declaration. Flanagan, the economic development director in George County, said operations at the Lucedale plant have gone on as usual and he hasn't heard any sign of that changing. 

Enviva declined to provide any comment for this story. 

Activists around the world, like Merry Dickinson in the U.K., are working to steer politicians against approving new subsidies for wood pellets. 

Dickinson lives about 20 miles from Drax's plant in Yorkshire, which is where the pellets from Gloster get shipped to and used for energy production. She was at the same shareholder meeting last April where Martin gave her testimony about the health issues in Gloster. 

“Learning about the huge amounts of subsidies that are coming from our energy bills to support (Drax) and then learning about what's happening to the communities like in Gloster, Mississippi, around the Southern U.S., and the devastating impact that Drax, and therefore our money in the U.K., is having on these people, on these forests… it is so outrageous,” she said. 

Despite her grievances with Drax, Martin has said repeatedly that she's not looking to shut down the company. After all, the town does need the jobs. In 2018, the town got its first grocery store in decades. At the end of the day, she just wants what's best for her hometown.

“No one's invested in Gloster. Everything's dead. The trees are dead, the grass is dead, the streets are a mess,” she said on a phone call in March. “We want to see something greater in Gloster.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.