Mill gets permit after long wait

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, December 31, 2003

EVERETT — It took a while, but the Kimberly-Clark Corp. paper products mill finally has permission to stay in business.

The plant, which is on the city’s waterfront, was in no danger of being shut down. But the main environmental permit it uses to operate was eight years past its renewal date.

Last week, the state Department of Ecology finally issued the new permit. It specifies similar standards for the main pollutants the mill releases, but has new, tougher restrictions on some of the more rare but dangerous chemicals the company sends into the bay.

Although there are valid reasons why the permit was delayed so long, next time it won’t take so much time, said Merley McCall, pulp-mill unit supervisor with the Department of Ecology.

"I think we have a very good permit, (but) we don’t want this to happen again," McCall said.

The old permit was supposed to cover only five years, but that got hung up within the agency’s bureaucracy and because of a delay in setting some key new federal standards.

The first of two major changes in the permit is a new requirement that the amount of chlorinated organics be regulated with a standard. Chlorinated organics are byproducts from using chlorine dioxide to bleach toilet paper and other products the mill produces.

Kimberly-Clark’s emissions of chlorinated organics have been far below the new standard, but environmentalists pushed the state to set a standard anyway.

The second biggest piece of the new permit is tighter standards for how much furon can be released from the mill, a toxic chemical that can build up in the body. Too much furon can hurt the human reproductive system.

The permit’s main job is to regulate how much organic material the paper mill releases into the bay, both lignin, the gluelike substance that holds wood together, and larger pieces of wood and other materials that make it through the paper-making process intact.

Neither standard changed significantly, McCall said.

The permit is better than the draft released last fall, said Ivy Sage-Rosenthal, an environmental advocate for the Washington State Public Interest Research Group, one of several environmental groups that weighed in on the renewal process.

"We’ve definitely seen some improvements, but there’s still work to do," she said.

Kimberly-Clark officials said their emissions are well within those set by the new permit, and that the company will be able to meet the new standards.

"It’s a good permit," said Dick Abrams, Kimberly-Clark’s environmental manager. "There’s work to do, certainly, but we’re continuing to work to get better and better."

The permit also requires Kimberly-Clark to do a number of studies, including looking at moving away from a chlorine dioxide-based bleaching process, something the company contends would result in products that customers wouldn’t buy.

Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.