Can a hundred-year-old chemicals business shake a toxic past?

12/19/2014
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A short drive away from the white-sand beaches of Georgia’s Golden Isles sits one of the last surviving heirs to the South’s naval stores trade. One of North America’s first chemical industries, naval stores refer to a variety of products manufactured from pine trees, originally used in the building and maintenance of ships. The industry peaked in the early 1900s, but by the mid-century was supplanted by the modern petrochemicals industry. However, one plant in Brunswick, Georgia, survives.

 

The 103-year-old business was bought in 2010 by a Canadian private equity firm, TorQuest Partners, which rechristened the company Pinova. For the last four years, Pinova has been reinventing itself as an environmentally friendly company which makes products derived from natural, renewable resources, primarily slash and longleaf pine stumps pulled from cutover forests in the southeastern United States. (Its other feedstocks include gum rosin and turpentine, also derived from pine trees, and d-Limonene, which is extracted from citrus peels.) Pinova grinds the stumps and, using a solvent wash, extracts rosins and oils that end up in a variety of familiar if surprising places, including adhesive bandages, chewing gum, citrus-flavored beverages and road asphalt.

 

 

With 250 employees and $112m in annual revenue, the company is a small player in a chemicals market valued at more than $800bn. This market has long been dominated by products derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels. But today there is a growing demand for chemicals manufactured from more sustainable and renewable feedstocks, and a 2009 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that bio-based chemicals could constitute as much as 10% of the larger chemicals market by 2015. Pinova is jockeying for a piece of this expanding market, and the company’s long history suggests some of the challenges ahead as the chemicals industry turns toward purportedly greener bio-based products.

 

A checkered past

In the early decades of the 20th century, the naval stores and timber industries chewed through the US south-east’s old-growth pine forests at a breakneck pace. Those forests, which once stretched from Virginia to east Texas and were one of North America’s most ecologically rich habitats, would soon vanish almost entirely from the Southern landscape.

 

Homer Yaryan, an entrepreneur from Toledo, Ohio, saw the sea of stumps left behind by the loggers as an opportunity, and in 1911 he invented a method for extracting wood rosin from pine stumps. Nine years later, he sold his Brunswick-based company to Hercules, then known as the Hercules Powder Company.

 

Over the years Hercules would refine an array of products from pine stumps, including, in 1948, a pesticide with the uncannily appropriate name toxaphene. Once popular with cotton and soybean farmers, toxaphene is a known carcinogen with the bad habit of persisting in those environments in which it is released. Hercules ceased production of the toxin in 1980. A few years later it was banned in the US and, in 2001, globally. But during the 32 years the company produced the pesticide, related wastes ended up in a local landfill, in the soil beneath the facility itself and in a nearby creek that empties into an important estuary.

 

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Decades later, only the landfill cleanup is complete. Fish-consumption advisories remain in effect for nearby waters, and earlier this year, toxaphene-related contaminants were discovered in the shallow aquifer beneath 13 properties abutting the plant.

 

Brunswick, Georgia, a small coastal city with a population of only 15,000, is left with a disproportionate share of chemical waste. While visitors to nearby beaches are cautioned to leave nothing behind but their footprints, Brunswick’s industries have discarded into its soil and waters a witches’ brew of toxic contaminants, and today the city hosts four Superfund sites and 17 properties on the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s Hazardous Site list. Production at the Hercules plant resulted in two of those Superfund sites and three of the properties on the EPD’s list.

 

When TorQuest purchased Pinova four years ago, Hercules and its parent company, Ashland, agreed to remain responsible for cleanup operations related to the site’s pre-2010 activities. But because both companies are signatories to the facility’s hazardous-waste-handling permit, the state of Georgia contends that both are ultimately responsible for site remediation. In May, a court affirmed the state’s position, which suggests that if Hercules fails to meet its regulatory obligations, for lack of will or financial resources, Pinova could be left holding the bag.

 

Whether Pinova can entirely disentangle itself from the toxic legacy of its facility’s past remains uncertain. However, the company does appear determined to distance itself from that legacy. “One of the things that’s spectacular about TorQuest is that one of their core values is to be a good neighbor and a good steward. In a lot of companies, that’s just words, but here, it’s actions and financial support,” says Pat Grozier, who has worked at the plant since 1986 and is currently vice president of Pinova’s supply chain.

 

Daniel Parshley, project manager for the Glenn Environmental Coalition, an advocacy group that has been fighting Brunswick’s polluters since 1990, agrees that the company has made a dramatic turnaround since TorQuest took over. “The Pinova plant is very different from the Hercules plant,” Parshley says, noting that while the plant used to be one of the area’s worst eyesores, it’s now one of the nicer-looking facilities.

 

Pinova has done a lot of plant maintenance, Parshley says, much of which had been deferred under Hercules’ management. The company has also added landscaping around the property, reduced odor emissions and installed a scrubber to eliminate the black smoke that once purled from the plant’s wood-burning boiler.

 

Officials at Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division also say that Pinova has been meeting its regulatory obligations in a timely manner.

 

A greener future?

While a cleaner, more responsible manufacturing process is a boon for Brunswick and the local environment, the real promise of bio-based chemicals is that they are derived not from fossil fuels but from renewable, sustainable resources. Pinova’s marketing message focuses on just this fact. “Many companies are trying to have a greener product,” says Carla Toth, the company’s Global Commercial Development Director. “And so they look to alternatives in the marketplace that are not carbon-based. Pinova’s wood rosin and rosin esters are a good alternative and are essentially green, made from sustainable resources.”

 

Those resources are primarily tree stumps gathered during the harvesting of commercially managed forests in the southeast.

 

But words like “sustainable” and “renewable” belie the grim history of commercial forests in the southeast, according to the ecologists who study them. These managed forests are a far cry from the species-rich pine savannas that once blanketed some 90m acres of the region.

 

“Commercially managed pine forests in the southeastern coastal plain are ecological disasters,” says Bruce Means, an expert on the ecology of southeastern pine forests and the director of the Coastal Plains Institute and Land Conservancy. “They are closed-canopy forests that after 15 to 20 years shift most of the primary productivity to the canopy, leaving the ground barren of living plants and dominated by pine litter.”

 

Of course, “commercially managed timber stands in the southeast can be planted, harvested and replanted over and over”, Means says, and in that sense they are sustainable. However, the forests are almost always planted with site-inappropriate tree species – slash or loblolly pine – and managed to maximize timber growth, with little concern for the larger ecology. Means says that those forests are only sustainable and renewable by the most generous definition.

 

But Toth says Pinova has little control over how the forests that supply its raw materials are managed. “The forestry industry exists for another purpose, not to create pine stumps for Pinova,” Toth says. “From a demand standpoint, we’re the tail on the dog.” So the company focuses on supporting sustainability in the areas it can control, she says, namely minimizing soil disturbance when extracting stumps and minimizing waste when processing those stumps. (It burns the leftover wood fibers to generate some of the electricity its plant needs.)

 

Another challenge for the bio-based chemicals industry is that natural, sustainable feedstocks do not necessarily lead to sustainable, environmentally friendly chemicals.

 

Rolf Halden, director of the Center for Environmental Security at Arizona State University, says that too often, “we create chemicals that linger [in the environment] for years or decades after the end of their useful life as a consumer product.” While natural materials tend to biodegrade more quickly and safely than synthetic materials, there is nothing “intrinsically safe” about bio-based chemicals, he says.

 

Indeed, Pinova admits that the rosin resins it produces from pine stumps biodegrade slowly, but points out that customers demand that very stability and durability in the final product. Pinova also asserts that these resins and their biodegradation products are non-hazardous and non-toxic.

 

“We all appreciate that we cannot indefinitely rely on fossil fuels,” Halden says. “In that sense, using natural materials like grass fibers and trees can be more sustainable than relying solely on synthetic materials and petroleum. But ultimately we have to look at the whole life cycle of the chemical we produce - everything from the resource extraction to the formation of the product to the end of life and disposal of the ingredients back to the environment. That is the real art of sustainability science.”

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