Georgia pulp mill accused of polluting Altamaha River. How is the state responding?

The small southeast Georgia town of Jesup is home to the world’s largest producer of a highly refined wood pulp used in cigarette filters and LCD screens. The Rayonier Advanced Materials pulp mill is Wayne County’s largest industrial employer and has been a mainstay of the community there for nearly seven decades.

But the mill has also been known since the 1950s as a polluter of the Altamaha River, into which it discharges some 50-to-60 million gallons a day of a dark and smelly effluent.

Aerial photos show a plume of discolored water which sometimes stretches for miles downstream and has an offensive smell that repels fishermen and boaters, according to local environmentalists seeking to block the renewal of the plant’s discharge permit, which is up for its periodic review by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD).

On Sept. 15, the Southern Environmental Law Center submitted a report to the EPD on behalf of the Altamaha Riverkeeper arguing it would be illegal for the agency to grant Rayonier the draft discharge permit put forward for public comment last month.

The SELC and Altamaha Riverkeeper argued in their brief that the mill’s discharge violates a state water quality standard prohibiting interference with the “designated use” of a given body of water. The designated use of the impacted portion of the Altamaha is for fishing; according to the Altamaha Riverkeeper, many local fishermen do not fish downstream of the plant due to “the offensive smell of the fish once cut open” — a result of the fish absorbing the compounds emitted in the mill’s discharge.

“When the mill shuts down, the water clears up. You can tell when the mill’s not running,” Maggie Van Cantfort, a watershed specialist at the Altamaha Riverkeeper, told the Telegraph.

A Rayonier spokesperson, Ryan Houck, told the Telegraph in an email that the SELC’s “characterization is patently false,” noting that Wayne County hosts an annual catfishing tournament on the Altamaha for which “hundreds of fishermen from nearly 50 counties and multiple states travel here just to fish in the river.”

Using a rejected water quality standard?

The industrial process for high-end pulp products like those created in Jesup requires the removal (and disposal) of heavier amounts of lignins — organic polymers that help the cell walls of wood and plants maintain rigidity — than the kind of pulp used in applications like papermaking.

These compounds heavily discolor the wastewater, which Rayonier dilutes with water before discharging it into the Altamaha.

Since 2008, the EPD has imposed limits on the color of the Rayonier mill’s discharge, since color is a good barometer for the presence of lignins and tannins. But activists say the environmental agency has been lax in its treatment of Rayonier, one of whose executives sits on the board of the Department of Natural Resources, of which the EPD is a division.

In 2016, a judge ruled that EPD should not have given Rayonier its discharge permit, because it violated a state water quality standard prohibiting “interference” with a waterway’s designated use (in this case, fishing).

In response, the EPD argued on appeal that the standard should actually be read to only prohibit “unreasonable” interference, a narrower criterion — and attempted to rewrite the water quality standard to make this interpretation explicit. A higher court sided with the EPD.

But after the ruling, the federal EPA rejected the EPD’s rule change, saying it would violate federal law. This forced the EPD to withdraw its addition of the word “unreasonable” and restore the original, stronger standard in 2020.

But at a DNR board meeting in January, an EPD official signaled the agency planned to implement its rule change anyway.

The SELC wrote in its report that, “somewhat unbelievably,” EPD appeared to be “applying the exact standard EPA just rejected and EPD explicitly withdrew.”

Laura Williams, the EPD’s director of legal services, told the Telegraph in an email the EPD would apply “the water quality standards that are presently in effect and approved by US EPA.” She did not directly address the question of whether the EPD would use the unreasonablenes standard.

The economic lifeblood of Wayne County

For generations, Jesup has been inextricably tied to Rayonier.

“Jesup and Rayonier Make Georgia History,” ran the headline in the Atlanta Constitution in March 1954, a month before the mill was opened.

The newspaper explained that Jesup, a “lovely little agricultural center near the Altamaha River,” was selected for the mill site because it “offered timber, plenty of water, an energetic people to supply a stable working force and an outlet to a growing market.”

The Constitution also described the impact of the mill’s opening on Jesup itself: “Already Jesup is moving to take advantage of its opportunities. New homes, two new banks, several new stores, a sewage disposal plant, miles of street pavement and other improvements have already been undertaken.”

But after the mill opened, the environmental effects of the town’s new benefactor soon became visible.

On Sept. 13 of the same year, thousands of dead fish washed up on the Altamaha River, lining the banks for 40 miles downstream of the plant. Operations at the mill were temporarily closed; the controversy ultimately forced Rayonier to install the mill’s first wastewater treatment system.

The fish kill portended a decades-long history of pollution, litigation and regulatory battles over the mill’s impact on the river. Beginning in 1956, fishermen reported a thick black slime on their nets and coating the riverbanks; it would take years for Rayonier to solve this issue.

The mill was among those featured in “The Water Lords,” a 1971 book on water pollution in Georgia by James Fallows, one of “Nader’s Raiders” — Ralph Nader’s group of muckraking public-interest researchers.

Rayonier has appeared eight times on the Georgia Water Coalition’s annual “Dirty Dozen” roundup of major pollution issues — the most of any offender since the organization began compiling the reports in 2011.

Rayonier’s critics concede that the company has made significant improvements over the years, albeit often prompted by litigation — and that its presence in the town has been beneficial for the many residents to whom it has brought jobs and services. Fish kills and slimy sludge are a thing of the past.

“A lot of people will speak highly of Rayonier” in the area, said Van Cantfort, the Altamaha Riverkeeper organizer, in a phone interview. “The people who’ve been here their whole lives have seen it go from really bad to what it is. They have made drastic improvements.

“If you talk to just about anybody over the age of 40 they’ll be able to tell you what the river used to be like — there was this black stringy stuff on the banks.”

Rayonier’s generations-long presence in the town can make things difficult for the company’s critics, Van Cantfort said.

“Past riverkeepers that worked for Altamaha Riverkeeper, they have had instances where they felt threatened, they felt unsafe because of the retaliation for doing activism around Rayonier,” she said. “I’ve been warned by people that I need to be careful.”

When The Telegraph called the Wayne County administration to ask about the pollution controversy, the unidentified person who answered declined to take questions, instead directing all questions to Rayonier.

Reached by phone, an unidentified communications person in the Jesup city government directed all questions about Rayonier to the county before hanging up on a Telegraph reporter.

The company is embedded in the civic institutions of Jesup and Wayne County. Rayonier’s manager of technical marketing, Miki Thomason, sits on the board of the Altamaha River & Leisure Services Authority as well as that of the statewide Department of Natural Resources.

Rayonier organizes field trips from the local middle schools to the Jesup plant; past tours have included “an environmental color demonstration” where STEM students learn “how Rayonier tests for color in the discharge,” according to Wayne County Magazine.

Better treatment technologies?

At hearings in 2016, a Canadian pulp industry expert named Neil McCubbin testified that the technologies for effluent control employed at the Jesup mill, despite improvements over the years, remain well below industry standards.

“Based on my experience with mills all over the world, I rank Rayonier as being in the bottom 10% of kraft pulp mills in terms of the environmental quality of its discharge,” McCubbin said in written testimony. “There are whole continents where this discharge would not be accepted.”

McCubbin’s authority as a witness was based in part on his specific knowledge of the Jesup mill: he was hired as a consultant by Rayonier in the 1980s to work at the plant, before helping the EPA craft regulatory guidelines governing pulp mill effluent discharge in the 1990s, and working with the Altamaha Riverkeeper in the 2000s to research alternate treatment technologies available at the Jesup mill.

McCubbin argued that the facility’s current technique for treating its wastewater — routing it into two large lagoons known as aerated stabilization basins, in which microbes eat many of the pollutants, before discharging it into the river — should be replaced with a process known as activated sludge treatment.

McCubbin wrote that, to his knowledge, all pulp mills built in the previous 25 years used activated sludge treatment, and that implementation of the system he recommends would reduce the Jesup plant’s color discharge by half.

Houck wrote in an email to The Telegraph that treatment using aerated stabilization basins “is better suited to our climate and process than SELC’s proposed system,” and said 75% of similar plants in the Southeast use the same technology as the Jesup plant.

“Our process also consumes far less energy than SELC’s suggested technology, which makes it better for the environment overall,” Houck added.

Next steps for permit

Laura Williams, the EPD legal director, wrote in her email that the “EPD is reviewing all draft permits to determine what, if any, changes may need to be made,” suggesting the permit could be revised in response to the criticism it has received.

The EPD is also awaiting a procedurally mandated review of the permit from the EPA, which has until a Nov. 10 deadline to provide comments to the state regulators.

There is no fixed timeline for when the EPD will release its final version of the discharge permit. If it is granted as currently written, this may open the door to yet another court battle.

In the meantime, Van Cantfort and other local activists must simply wait — unless the mill’s owner decides of its own accord to address activist concerns.

“We all know that Rayonier can do better if they choose to,” said Van Cantfort.