In Canton, paper mill’s closure eliminates jobs and leaves 115 years’ of pollution behind

Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains about 20 miles west of Asheville, the small town of Canton seems to sprout from the steep hillsides, defying gravity. Its downtown is laid out as a surrender to the topography: a warren of alleys and hidden walkways, coiled roads and railroad spurs. Most important, the town is cleft by its natural lifeline, the Pigeon River, which in calm weather seems to lollygag rather than to run.

Canton’s economic lifeline, the paper mill Pactiv Evergreen, perches on the banks of the river. For more than 100 years, the company and its predecessors have polluted the waterway — the town’s drinking water source — as well as the air and the groundwater within and beyond its property boundaries. Contamination from the mill has been “continuous since 1908,” a letter sent last year to the company by the NC Department of Environmental Quality reads.

Yet, Pactiv Evergreen, and Champion Paper and Fibre before it, have also been responsible for employing five generations of workers. Empowered by the United Steelworkers union, the employees and their families earned passage to the middle class.

Now, as part of a corporate restructuring, a phased closure of the mill will take place within the next month, cutting off the livelihoods of more than 1,100 people. An additional 3,000 workers whose jobs support the mill — loggers, timber sales, truck drivers — will also be affected. Economic losses could reach $1 billion.

“This has been traumatic,” said Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, at a roundtable discussion with local and state officials, including a representative from the governor’s office, earlier this week. “The pandemic, the flood, death” — Tropical Storm Fred killed six people in 2021 — and now this. This closure has been a death in the family.”

Town Alderman Ralph Hamlett said he was concerned about the mental health of displaced workers and their families. “It’s going to be different when the smokestacks stop pumping,” Hamlett said. “The mill gave people a sense of wellbeing and purpose — a sense of identity.”

But the economic devastation and its fallout are only two of Canton’s concerns. Pactiv Evergreen is saddling the town with a century of pollution, the extent of which is still unknown. The dirty, energy-intensive nature of the paper and pulp industry means that nearly every emission and discharge contains a toxic chemical.

Worse yet, because of an unusual agreement brokered in the 1960s between the town and the mill — then Champion Paper — the company also operates the town’s wastewater treatment plant. Pactiv Evergreen is required to operate the plant for two years after the mill closes. In mid-2025 Canton will need an alternative or have nowhere to send and treat its sewage.

“We expect you to do the right thing,” Secretary of the Environment Elizabeth Biser told Pactiv Evergreen officials, who, with a company attorney, attended the discussion. After the plant closes, Pactiv will still be responsible for the cleanup. “We will use our authority and available resources to find the environmental legacy issues at the site,” Biser said, “and to explore future wastewater treatment options for the town.”

Fern Paterson, the company’s associate general counsel for Environmental Health and Safety, was careful not to overpromise on a future cleanup.

“There’s a lot to be worked out,” Paterson said. “One of the things we’re committed to is open communication.”

More than a century of pollution

Since Champion built the plant in 1908, life in Canton has centered on the mill — literally, as it engulfs the middle of town, and consumes 10% of its land area. For the first half of the mill’s history, there were no environmental regulations, no EPA, no DEQ. It was common practice — not just for mills, but all industries — to dump waste where it was convenient.

But even after the EPA was created by the Nixon administration in 1972, and subsequent environmental laws went into effect, the mill has often flouted those regulations. Although the company invested in more than $500 million in facility improvements — in part to reduce the levels of cancer-causing compounds entering the Pigeon River — state and federal records show the company’s toxic legacy.

There have been fuel oil leaks from underground storage tanks, excessive sulfur dioxide emissions, ammonia and particulate matter from the stacks, chromium and nickel in the groundwater, dioxins in the river.

And the mill’s legally permitted emissions and discharges are stunning: An average of 6,500 tons of sulfur dioxide each year, plus thousands more tons of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds, are emitted into the air, state permit records show. Hazardous air pollutants hovered around 624 tons annually.

All of this has added up to an extensive violation history — in the hundreds — albeit one without meaningful fines, considering the company’s annual revenues of more than $6 billion. Other myriad legal mechanisms have been deployed to get Pactiv to comply: settlement agreements, special orders by consent, lawsuits filed by environmental groups and the state of Tennessee over river pollution.

Most recently, in January 2022, DEQ learned of “black liquor” seeps discharging into the Pigeon River. A byproduct of paper pulp, black liquor is a tar-like, caustic substance that can contain high levels of arsenic, sulfur and mercury. 

The seeps were initially discovered in 1994, when DEQ cited Champion Paper, then the owner, for a Clean Water Act violation. DEQ officials believe a “reactivation” accounts for the new discharges, and cited Pactiv’s corporate parent for a Notice of Violation last April, according to state documents.

Officials from EPA’s Region 4 office, which covers North Carolina, are coordinating with DEQ on investigating the seeps, EPA spokesperson Brandi Jenkins told NC Newsline in an email. 

If that evaluation, conducted under the Superfund Removal Program, finds the “contamination entering or potentially entering the Pigeon River poses a threat,” Jenkins wrote, the EPA will use the information “to determine if additional action is appropriate.”

However, the EPA would not add the mill to the Superfund program without data to show the type and extent of the contamination; then the site would be scored based on health and environmental risks.

“It’s premature to get in a Superfund discussion,” Biser said.

A looming infrastructure crisis

With so many urgent needs, it’s difficult for Canton officials to choose just one to address. But without a functioning wastewater treatment plant, there will be no functioning town. For the town to build and operate its own plant after Pactiv’s obligation ends in two years, it would cost $35 million to $40 million. For context, the town’s annual operational budget is only $11 million, a figure likely to take a hit from lost tax revenue from the mill closure.  

It would be nearly impossible for Canton to immediately run a facility of that size and magnitude, especially considering the loss of tax revenue from the mill, said Town Manager Nick Scheuer. 

Federal money through the American Rescue Plan could help pay for some or even all of the construction, but those funds can’t buy what Canton desperately needs: time. Building a wastewater treatment plant takes at least five years.

During this week’s discussion, one local resident suggested regionalizing the wastewater utilities. Only 62,000 people live in Haywood County — 4,000 of them in Canton. If every town and the county anted up to build and operate one treatment plant, the cost would be more manageable, including for the ratepayers.

Hope for a cleanup and a different future

This summer, the stacks at the mill will take their final breath, exhaling acrid ammonia and sulfur dioxide for the last time. Then state and local officials must decide what to do with the 185-acre sarcophagus lying in a flood plain, a constant reminder of economic loss and environmental ruin.

Biser said the cleanup should ensure the future use of the site is productive. This can be accomplished through a Brownfields program, which provides tax breaks to companies that redevelop contaminated sites. (Those companies are also held harmless from liability unless they contribute to the contamination.)

Unfortunately, there is a history of major companies stalling their cleanups or burdening towns with dilapidated, empty buildings: The former Alcoa plant in Badin has a new tenant, but the building is largely vacant. Groundwater beneath the site, which consumes several city blocks, continues to contaminate Badin Lake, a drinking water supply, with arsenic and fluoride, 

The 22-acre former Tar Heel Army Missile Plant in Burlington has lain fallow for 30 years. The federal government has allowed the groundwater contamination to spread beneath the neighborhood, unabated.

So Mayor Smathers looks to Pigeon River. It starts just above Canton and travels 70 miles to Tennessee, through the Pisgah and Cherokee National Forests. Perhaps if the dam were removed, the contamination abated, the acrid smell eliminated, the natural color of the river restored, then kayakers, boaters and rafters would more often come upstream and into town. 

“The river brought us settlers. It brought us the paper mill,” Smathers said. “It will bring us the next phase. Failure is not an option.”