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Arkansas Public Media Pellet Mill Industry Report Airs on NPR

Dogwood Alliance

In 2017, Arkansas Public Media began to investigate the proliferation of industrial chip mills across the Deep South, including a newly opened mill in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The mills are grinding timber stands into millions of tons of wood pellets for export to fuel retrofitted coal fire plants in the European Union and United Kingdom, where biomass is classified and subsidized as clean renewable fuel. The pellet industry, which is self-regulated, claims to use sustainable logging practices and that wood pellets are a carbon neutral fuel. Opponents claim chip mills are destroying native southern forests and pellets burn dirtier than coal.

We prepared a national report on the controversy which recently aired on NPR's "All Things Considered," which you can listen to here.

Credit Dogwood Alliance
Loggers harvest trees in Sampson County, North Carolina, last winter, for hauling to an Enviva wood chip mill.

Jacqueline Froelich is an award-winning senior news reporter for KUAF-91.3 FM in Fayetteville where she is a long-time station-based correspondent for NPR in Washington D.C. She covers energy, business, education, politics, the environment, and culture. Her work is broadcast locally on KUAF’s daily news magazine, “Ozarks At Large,” and statewide on Arkansas’s three public radio affiliates.
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