- Industrial forest biomass wood pellet mills now dot rural areas around the globe, with plants concentrated in the U.S. Southeast, and other major facilities found in Canada, the EU, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere. The EU, Japan and South Korea burn most of the wood pellets currently being produced.
- Pellet mills have increasingly come under fire from rural communities who accuse large-scale manufacturers like the U.K.’s Drax and Enviva in the U.S. of air pollution, dust and noise violations, which harm residents’ health and quality of life. A 2023 study found that pellet mills in the U.S. Southeast release 55 hazardous pollutants.
- In a rare victory last April, the town of Gloster, Mississippi, won a major pollution permitting battle against Drax’s Amite BioEnergy pellet mill — one of the largest in the world. But at an October appeal meeting, the Mississippi Department of Environment Quality reversed itself, giving Drax permission to pollute more today than previously.
- The Drax plant has been fined more than $2.75 million since 2016 for exceeding toxic emissions limits. Drax says it has invested millions in pollution mitigation technology to prevent future pollution. A law firm representing Gloster citizens is filing a federal lawsuit alleging Drax has been violating the Clean Air Act since opening the Gloster plant in 2015.
In April 2025, the town of Gloster, Mississippi, population 858, won a significant battle against the giant global wood pellet maker Drax, when the permitting board of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) sided with the small community and denied the company’s request to increase air pollution limits so it could increase its manufacturing output.
Residents living near the Amite BioEnergy pellet mill breathed a sigh of relief then, thinking they had prevailed in proving their argument that Drax’s emissions were already harming their health and quality of life. The U.K.-based company had been fined three times by DEQ since 2016 for more than $2.75 million for exceeding toxic emissions limits at the plant.
Then, on Oct. 15, DEQ reversed its previous decision. It agreed to reclassify Drax from being a minor emitter of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) to being a major emitter, thus technically giving it permission to legally emit more HAPs than in recent years.
In reversing its decision, DEQ appears to be betting on Drax’s pledge that recently installed pollution-control technology will reduce emissions overall at the Gloster plant over the long run — even as the facility seeks to produce more wood pellets.
Regardless of the reasoning, the DEQ reversal didn’t surprise Gloster public health advocate Krystal Martin. She told Mongabay her concern grew when, in the month before DEQ’s October meeting, Drax launched an intensive social media campaign with regular Facebook posts to a large following.
This PR blitz noted that Drax had made a $200 million investment in a poor state by building its Amite pellet mill, where it employs more than 60 people; that the firm had contributed $286,000 to Gloster-area nonprofits; and had paid millions in local taxes.
“Every day was a PR stunt,” said Martin, who has been battling Drax’s impacts on Gloster residents for a decade. “It was like they were sending us a message to let us know that, basically, they had paid to make their appeal go their way.”
The two-day DEQ hearing on Oct. 14-15 in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, drew an overflowing crowd of Drax opponents and some supporters. Company attorneys said Drax had invested $73 million over the past five years in advanced pollution-reduction technology at its Amite BioEnergy site, and claimed the pellet facility could remove 96% of HAPs from its emissions.
The DEQ permitting panel was unanimously persuaded, fully reversing its 5-1 decision from six months earlier, when the department denied the pollution reclassification.
A new pollution status
At the October meeting, DEQ granted Drax a Title V permit under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act, while reclassifying its pollution status. The EPA specifies pollution limits under its Title V permit by industry, and Drax now has new, higher emissions targets it must stay under.
Andrew Whitehurst, an official with Healthy Gulf in Madison, Mississippi, is a former DEQ permit board member. He has been consulting with Gloster residents about the appeal process and attended the recent hearing in Jackson.
Whitehurst told Mongabay that Drax has been struggling for years to get its smokestack mitigation technology, called regenerative catalytic oxidizers, to work in Gloster, without much success to date.
“Drax attorneys testified that their equipment is now working better than it has been and that they are confident that they can reduce HAPs over time,” Whitehurst said. “And DEQ bought it. DEQ is taking a leap of faith with Drax that the equipment will actually work.”
But, apparently, those oxidizers were not working in 2024 when Mississippi DEQ fined Drax $250,000 for releasing 50% more HAPS than its permitted limit. Residents told Mongabay they’ve observed no reduction in emissions or dust, which they say is disrupting their quality of life, and for some, their health.
“The noise level is actually worse, especially at night, with the plant and truck traffic,” said Jimmy Brown, co-founder of Greater Greener Gloster. “We have complained to Drax about the constant noise and pollution, and they won’t meet with us.”
According to the EPA, extended exposure to HAPs, like those experienced by Gloster residents living near the plant, can increase the likelihood of cancer, immune system and neurological damage, and lead to respiratory ailments.
Study confirms health dangers of pellet mill emissions
Complaints against pellet mill pollution and evidence that such facilities can impact public health and disrupt rural life have increased in recent years.
A peer-reviewed study published in December 2023, which looked at wood pellet facilities in the U.S. Southeast, which includes Mississippi, found for the first time that the region’s forest biomass manufacturing plants release some 55 hazardous pollutants that exceed many state and federal air quality standards.
The study found that thousands of tons of toxic, health-harming air pollutants — ranging from dioxin to nitrogen oxide to volatile organic compounds — are emitted in the pellet-making process, especially in the Southeast, where most U.S. facilities are found. Researchers confirmed that the 55 hazardous pollutants collectively exceeded by two times the allowable pollution permitted by state air quality agencies.
The study, published in the journal Renewable Energy, also confirmed that U.S. pellet mills are mostly located in places which, like Gloster, are mainly poor, minority communities. And it is those communities that are most impacted by the mills’ toxic air pollution.
“Fourteen million people in the United States live within a few miles of bioenergy facilities and breathe potentially harmful toxins and pollutants,” Edie Juno, co-author of the study and a forestry specialist with the National Wildlife Federation, told Mongabay in 2024. “As the bioenergy market continues to grow globally, it is critical that we understand the impacts and costs of utilizing biomass for energy.”
Juno confirmed that making and burning wood pellets for industrial-scale energy generation — mostly in the European Union, U.K., Japan and South Korea — also leads to toxic pollution that can be hazardous to public health.
Residents heading to federal court
In winning its appeal, Drax spokesperson Michelli Martin applauded the reversal in a statement, saying DEQ “listened to the clear recommendations of its own technical staff.”
In an email response to Mongabay, Martin wrote that Drax undertook an agency review and commissioned a toxicologist to study emissions in Gloster in 2021 and 2013. “Both concluded that there is no scientific evidence linking Hazardous Air Pollutant emissions from the Gloster plant to any adverse health outcomes in the Gloster area,” she wrote.
With the new EPA classification, the Amite BioEnergy facility can now make up to 624,000 metric tons of wood pellets annually — provided it stays below its newly increased air pollution limits; the company also agreed to more stringent DEQ monitoring of its emissions, Martin told Mongabay.
In previous years, Drax could not produce its permitted tonnage of wood pellets without exceeding Mississippi air pollution regulations. Amite is among the largest pellet-making plants in the U.S.
Krystal Martin, the Gloster public health advocate, confirmed that community members, represented by law firm Singleton Schreiber, have filed a federal lawsuit against Drax, alleging the company has been violating the Clean Air Act since it began operating in Gloster in 2015. The lawsuit seeks damages to cover loss of property value and safe use of the plaintiffs’ homes.
Activist Martin said she and her group have enlisted the support of U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who has been sympathetic to the plight of Gloster residents. He met with many of them after the DEQ reversal.
“I started this work because my mom’s health was declining, and then so many people in the community started to share their health concerns with me,” Krystal Martin said, noting that she has little faith in Drax’s emissions review or toxicology reports. “As a result, we started connecting the dots, and we discovered that a lot of people have the same, similar, health issues since the Drax plant opened.”
Banner image: Greater Greener Gloster community members at the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, during an event earlier this year demanding the cleanup of the Drax wood pellet mill in their community and an end to biomass industry subsidies. Image courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.
Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor to Mongabay, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Citation:
Tran, H., Juno, E., & Arunachalam, S. (2023). Emissions of wood pelletization and bioenergy use in the United States. Renewable Energy, 219(2), 119536. doi:10.1016/j.renene.2023.119536
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