There comes a time in the life of an aging industrial facility where deliberate planning for its closure, cleanup, and replacement must begin. For the Port Townsend Paper Corporation mill, that time is now. Take your pick, the problems are proliferating: foul odors, marine organisms smothered by debris or suffocating from nutrient pollution, foam and algal blooms along the shore, occupational health and safety violations, water and air quality violations, climate pollution and toxins that will be around for a very long time.

You can drill down on any one of these and see how bad the news gets. Take chronic violations of the mill’s national pollution discharge elimination (NPDES) permit. As noted by Scott Doggett in his 11-19 opinion piece “Mill keeps the public in the dark about spill,” many of the pollutants the mill discharges in its wastewater are neurotoxins and carcinogen and several are among the most toxic substances on Earth. He notes that there have been 23 permit violations in the past seven years. These join 148 permit violations or triggers and 51 enforcement actions since 1990. As Doggett notes in a follow up piece in the Leader on 11-26, the paltry fines Washington Department of Ecology assesses for these violations have not been raised since the late 1980s and are having little or no effect on incentivizing better behavior. 

Or take air quality. We’re all familiar with the odors caused by emissions from the settling pond, leaky pipes, and the stack. Measured contaminants include reduced sulfur compounds, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and aldehydes. The sulfur compounds are what causes the smell. According to the Environmental Integrity Project, the mill has been in violation of the Clean Air Act for 12 of the last 12 quarters. In 2024, the US Department of Health and Human Services warned that breathing a cocktail of sulfur compounds in air near the mill can cause acute respiratory distress.

And the mill is by far the largest source of climate pollution in Jefferson County. The 2023 facility inventory from the EPA put the mill’s carbon dioxide emissions from burning wood chips and using fossil fuels at 554,000 metric tons CO2 per year. That’s over two and a half times the emissions from the rest of Jefferson County’s economy (207,582 metric tons).

Given all this, a clean replacement facility that keeps all jobs intact and is financially attractive to investors is sorely needed. Otherwise, we end up like Port Angeles, with 200 sudden layoffs and a decades-long toxic cleanup legacy. Here’s one option to consider: a state-of-the-art pulp and paper facility located away from the shore that consumes far less water, energy and chemicals and has a much lower carbon footprint because it uses wheat straw, hemp, kenaf, bamboo or agricultural wastes from Washington farmers as feedstock rather than wood (virgin or recycled). It would also generate far less odors since non-kraft pulping processes can be used with these feedstocks. The resource efficiency gains – i.e. less environmental impact per ton of product – stems from lower levels of lignin, which makes these feedstocks easier to process. And well-paying union jobs would be involved with dismantling the existing mill and building and operating the new one.

While most non-wood pulp and paper facilities are in China and India the US is beginning to catch up as the demand for clean and green products soars. Companies like Genera (Tennessee) and Cotrell Paper (Massachusetts) are using wheat straw and hemp as feedstock and are using far less water, energy, and chemical than their wood-based competitors. Here in Washington, Columbia Pulp was the first large scale experiment – one that was designed to use wheat straw feedstock from eastern Washington farmers, but it opened its plant just as COVID hit and had to shut down operations in 2019.