Wood Pellet Maker Drax Denied Pollution Permit After Small Town Mississippi Outcry
Jimmy Brown has lived less than a mile from the Drax wood pellet manufacturing plant in the tiny town of Gloster in Amite County, Mississippi, since it opened in 2016. The impact on his quality of life, and often his health, was the same then as it is now.
“It’s terrible,” Brown told Mongabay. “You got dust falling all night. You got constant noise from the plant. You got odor. You got truck traffic [carrying tons of trees and chipped wood] all day, every day. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s nonstop.”
On April 8, during a three-hour hearing in the state capital of Jackson, Brown, along with about 50 of his neighbors, made the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s (MDEQ) Permit Board understand his and Gloster’s plight. The board voted 5-1 to deny Drax’s request to be reclassified from a minor to a major source of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs).
An approval would have enabled Drax — permitted to make 500,000 metric tons of wood pellets annually at its Amite plant — to hit that annual production target and not incur millions of dollars in future fines for violating Mississippi air pollution restrictions. The Gloster plant is among the largest forest biomass-for-energy pellet production facilities in the world.
Drax has twice previously been fined by MDEQ for such violations: $2.5 million in 2020 —one of the largest air-pollution fines in state history — for underestimating hazardous pollutants emitted since the mill’s 2016 opening. It was again fined $225,000 last year for emitting more than 50% of its permitted limit of HAPs, which are toxic chemical pollutants. 05-01-25
