Europe burns wood pellets. Impacts rise for US communities, forests.

Belinda Joyner has spent most of her life in Northampton County, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. She has raised a family, worked as a teacher’s assistant, and for more than a quarter of a century, fought against what she sees as polluting, outside industries trying to move into her mostly poor, Black community.

Ms. Joyner runs a small, grassroots environmental group called Concerned Citizens of Northampton County. Her group has worked to block a coal ash landfill, a liquid fertilizer plant, a hazardous waste incinerator, a private prison, and perhaps most prominently, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. But these days, she and her small band of activists have a new target – one that has proved both harder to defeat and far more complicated to oppose: the booming biomass, or wood pellet, industry.

The biomass sector is different from other foes. It bills itself as an environmentally friendly, clean energy climate solution, and is relied upon by regulators and legislators around the world to meet goals for reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

“We are part of a healthy and growing forestry industry in the U.S. South and source our biomass from sustainable, managed, working forests,” says Jacob Westfall, spokesperson for Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet company. 

But Ms. Joyner and a growing number of critics say the wood pellet industry is just the latest in a generations-long trend of wealthy individuals and companies claiming green status while outsourcing their environmental pollution to marginalized communities.  

At the heart of this controversy are questions about both transparency and justice in the global fight to combat climate change – including whether the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions can be done in a way that alleviates instead of increases long-standing inequalities.

For decades, communities of color and other marginalized groups have disproportionately borne environmental burdens, whether because of resource extraction or the placement of hazardous facilities. These populations are also the most disproportionately impacted by climate change.

“The impacts of climate change that we are feeling today, from extreme heat to flooding to severe storms, are expected to get worse, and people least able to prepare and cope are disproportionately exposed,” said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan in releasing a 2021 report on this pattern. 

To address this unfairness, advocates say that climate solutions should not only focus on lowering global emissions but also address environmental justice in communities.

The wood pellet industry, say critics like Ms. Joyner, does neither.

The biomass rush began in the late 2000s, when the European Parliament passed what became known as the Renewable Energy Directive, a legal framework for boosting renewable sources to 20% of European Union energy by 2020. One way to do this, analysts suggested at the time, was to use biomass instead of fossil fuels.  

Regulatory agencies around the world generally consider biomass – or organic material from animals and plants, including wood pellets – as a renewable energy source. The idea is that byproducts from agriculture, wood factories, or other sources can be turned into fuel, as can wood pellets made from trees, which can be replanted.   

Rapid expansion of an industry

But for European policymakers there was a problem: There weren’t sufficient forests in Europe to supply a wood pellet industry of the size needed to meet decarbonization goals. 

Fairly quickly, European countries started looking toward an old Colonial stomping ground: the American Southeast, where ample privately owned forests and relatively lax environmental regulations paved the way for dramatic industry growth.

In a sign of things to come, a wood pellet facility opened in Ahoskie, North Carolina, in 2011. According to the industry publication Biomass Magazine, more than 100 wood pellet facilities are now scattered from Maine and New York to Washington and Oregon. By making wood biomass from American forests a centerpiece of its clean power revolution, the EU ballooned its wood pellet consumption from 9.8 million metric tons in 2009 to 23.1 million in 2021 – much of that sourced in the American South. 

One of the world’s largest wood pellet producers, Maryland-based Enviva, operates 10 wood pellet facilities in the United States – one each in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia; two in Mississippi; and four in North Carolina. All are located in lower-income communities of color.

Companies say their operations offer jobs while causing little environmental impact. Their impact on forestland is minimal because, they have claimed, they use only wood unsuitable for other purposes, such as tree limbs and leftover wood from timber harvests. Any trees that are felled are quickly replanted, they say.

But Derb Carter, senior adviser and attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, is skeptical of that claim.

“I thought there was no way to get a meaningful amount of energy from wood unless you substantially harvested forests all across the state,” Mr. Carter says. And when he visited one North Carolina plant, Mr. Carter says he was horrified by what he saw. “They were clear-cutting bottomland swamps to supply the pellet mill, and there were dozens of trucks carrying hardwood logs to the biggest log pile I'd ever seen,” he says. 

The impact on the communities near the plants has been substantial as well, according to many residents.

Debra David, for instance, has spent her whole life on family land in Hamlet, the Richmond County town of 6,000 best known as the birthplace of jazz legend John Coltrane. Ms. David had never heard of wood pellets until Enviva selected Hamlet as the location for its fourth plant in North Carolina.

She and others protested the plant, citing a 2018 report from the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project, which analyzed the environmental impact of 21 wood pellet processing plants across the South. More than half of those plants had either failed to keep emissions below permit limits or lacked sufficient pollution controls, the group found, and together they were emitting thousands of tons of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and volatile organic compounds each year.

Still, after public hearings, the state allowed Enviva’s project to proceed. Ms. David says locals must now contend with constant noise from the pellet plant, wood chips and dust that fly off trucks, and a pervasive stench akin to rotten eggs. Many people worry about the impact of the poor air quality. 

Enviva, for its part, advertises its dedication to being a “good neighbor.” It has given financial support to local fire stations, schools, and environmental organizations. It also reports to have created around 1,300 jobs, many in the rural Southeast.

Ryan Emanuel, associate professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, says there’s a familiar rhetoric, whether the topic is animal feeding operations, power plants, or wood pellets. 

“The script I’ve seen play out time and again is always, ‘Look over here at jobs. Don’t look over here at the pollution or over here at the health impacts.’ It’s as if you can throw out a number of jobs that will make it OK to expose people to a certain level of harm,” he says.

Climate solution?

But in addition to jobs, wood pellet companies boast another communal good: They say they are a solution to climate change.

The wood pellets created in Ms. David’s community are almost entirely shipped to the EU, where biomass as of 2019 accounted for about 60% of renewable energy.

But researchers are starting to take a closer look at the carbon accounting of wood pellets. Under a decades-old international agreement, carbon emissions from wood pellets are only counted at the point of combustion. In other words, the “climate friendliness” of biomass doesn’t take into account the loss of trees or the emissions connected to either processing plants or transportation. 

The industry insists it quickly reforests its properties, planting new trees to replace the old. But it takes decades for new trees to grow and absorb carbon on a par with the ones that grew before. Soil biodiversity, which plays a role in carbon sequestration, is also damaged by logging.

Last spring, the EU announced that it was considering changes to its climate policies to no longer classify wood pellets as renewable, carbon-neutral energy. Such a change would have eliminated billions in government subsidies for the wood pellet industry. 

Industry lobbyists and U.S. politicians came out in support of the subsidies. The war in Ukraine, and connected worries about energy sources, also pushed legislators, according to analysts. The European Parliament backtracked. And in North Carolina, Belinda Joyner’s fight goes on.

This reporting was supported by an environmental justice reporting grant from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources. 

Flyover was facilitated by SouthWings, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that coordinates a network of volunteer pilots across the southeastern U.S. to provide an aerial perspective to help shed light on and solve pressing environmental issues.