“Yuck, the stench is back again!  Shut the windows!”

That phrase is muttered too often around here, usually around midnight, just after falling asleep.  How is it that the warmest nights seem to attract the foulest emanations from the paper mill?  Just how bad is this stuff for us and why do we put up with it?

Lucky for us, the federal agency ATSDR has studied the problem and they presented their findings to the Port Townsend community on July 10. Sixteen years in the making, six years after their 10-week air sampling was completed, the $550,000 study’s findings can be summarized as “It stinks bad but probably won’t kill you.” Their recommendations are equally pointless — keep complaining as you’ve been doing for decades and close your windows when it’s at its worst.  

Perhaps there’s hope for the future? After all, a new venture capital group purchased the mill in October 2022 and they are putting money into long deferred maintenance to keep the mill going. Will they be making the changes needed to prevent us from choking on the noxious odors that have been plaguing us since 1927?

I’ve got to put in my two cents here about the mill. I’m glad it’s here, providing decent paying union jobs for hundreds of people, making a product, kraft paper, that’s the basis for the boxes that keep Port Townsend supplied with nearly everything we use. And they recycle our cardboard, too!  I’m no hater, but I’m definitely no fan of the stench and I’m not so naïve as to believe the mill owners have our best interests in mind!

So why does making kraft paper stink so much? Have you seen those barges of wood chips sitting in the bay just out from the mill? Those chips are “digested” with a highly caustic substance called “black liquor” before they are ready to be made into sheets of pulp, a base material for the making of more refined types of paper. This digesting process is what creates most of the sulfur stench we’ve all come to abhor.  

The pulp at the Port Townsend Paper Corportatopn mill is made from digested chips on a machine installed in 1927. The newer paper making machine was installed in the 1940s and upgraded in the 1980s.  It uses a mixture of pulp made from the chips and recycled cardboard to make kraft paper. But most of the pulp is sent to the Asian market to be further refined into higher grades of paper, leaving the stench here.  Mills that use pulp or all recycled material have dramatically less stench spewing out of them.

What changes can we expect from the mill? The ATSDR report suggests that the mill “should make additional efforts” in reducing the stench but there’s no regulatory authority to make them do so.  In fact, the only environmentally focused plan I heard from the mill was to combine paid advertising with press releases in the Port Townsend Leader touting the “sustainability” of the mill. The five-year investment plan of the new owners is only addressing deferred maintenance, according to mill representatives. They also said that their kraft paper customers prefer some virgin fiber from chips in the finished product and much of their sales come from the raw pulp, so we can’t expect them to willingly change to purely recycled paper. After all, the mill in Port Angeles, which uses all recycled content, shut down recently presumably due to low demand for their products.

Where does that leave us as a community? Do we just continue to accept that the mill is an important part of our town, and their noxious fumes are “the smell of good jobs?” Do we try to apply pressure to encourage the transition to all recycled content, even though there’s no financial incentive to do so? 

Venture capital groups who purchase aging technology at a low price have a history of having only one goal in mind — generating higher-than-average profits for as long as they can be maintained. 

My own experience of a pulp mill in California just south of the Oregon border followed a similar scenario: a series of venture capital firms purchased the mill until the increasing costs of maintenance didn’t justify further investment. When the numbers didn’t pencil out anymore the last venture capital group dissolved the company, abandoned the facility, and left behind leaking tanks of the black liquor on the shores of a major oyster producing bay. Eventually the mill became a Superfund site that was cleaned up at taxpayer expense, fortunately before it leaked into the bay. 

We don’t want that here!

Maybe there’s another alternative. Port Townsend is a creative, thinking-outside-the-box sort of place with a host of highly skilled retired professionals.  How much is it worth it to us to search for another way forward? New technologies to reduce or capture the noxious sulfur compounds are being researched in many places. Beginning with collaborative fact-finding sessions between mill owners and community members, could a private/public partnership be developed to explore ways to reduce, capture or contain the sulfur compounds before they blanket our community, ruining our quality of life on far too many days?  

I’d welcome the chance to help create a group of people willing to dive deeply into possible models that keep the jobs here but don’t stink up the town. Without engagement with the mill we’ll be facing decades of “Yuck, the stench is back!” or something worse.

Don Ehnebuske has lived in and appreciated Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula for nearly ten years. He can be reached at pt.nostench@gmail.com.