Burning Issue

FROM THE ROOFTOP of the International Paper mill in Ticonderoga, New York, the view to the east is postcard-pretty: Lake Champlain lies silver in the valley, rolling hills shape the near lands of Vermont, and in the distance stand some of the highest peaks of the Green Mountains.

The view west, by contrast, is blocked by a smokestack that measures 13 feet wide and 205 feet high (more than five times as tall as Fenway Park's Green Monster). From this black tube of stainless steel, steam and papermaking emissions rise by the ton, day and night, like an arm of toxic white.

This particular intersection of industry and beauty has generated conflict in the surrounding communities for decades. And now a proposal to burn tire chips in the paper mill's furnace has sparked an environmental controversy of a whole new order. Replacing oil with tires would save the plant millions of dollars on energy, perhaps preserving hundreds of endangered jobs. But burning tires would also release toxins that would sail, due to prevailing westerly winds, onto farms and homes across Lake Champlain. What goes up in New York comes down in New England.

The proposal has catalyzed people on both sides of the water to demonstrate and to crowd hearings. It has drawn thousands of letters and petition signatures to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which will decide whether the plant may burn tires. It has sown division between the previously friendly Republican governors on each shore and both states' congressional delegations. Last month, Vermont filed a lawsuit against New York to block the project.

Is this one more chapter of the familiar story, one more time that the only apparent avenue for protecting threatened jobs is to compromise a public resource? In part, yes. But the paper mill's proposal also raises a more troubling issue: Are the nation's hard-won gains in air quality secure, or might they not be so permanent after all?

The answers have huge ramifications for Vermont, which banks on its image of clean living and unspoiled natural attractions to tempt tourists and residents and to sell everything from maple syrup to cheese. But the answers also affect all of New England, where challenges in improving air quality are exacerbated by pollution generated upwind. Usually, the offending smokestacks loom hundreds of miles away at factories and power plants in the Midwest. This time, polluter and polluted can just look out their windows and see each other.

WHEN ELIZABETH and Richard Carpenter left Hingham six years ago to go house hunting in Orwell, Vermont, a snowstorm hid the horizon. Otherwise, they would have seen the plume of smoke above the 200-acre mill compound, seven industrial buildings standing up to four stories high, logs stacked a dozen high in a 25-acre wood yard, a land-fill that handles 150,000 cubic yards of mill waste a year, a water treatment plant, and, of course, the smokestack. In Hingham, Elizabeth had been a volunteer for the Fresh Air Fund since closing her gourmet catering business in the mid-1990s; Richard, an MIT graduate, had sold his share of a software company he cofounded. "I wanted at least 20 acres," Elizabeth says. "He wanted to be on the water. We wanted to stay within four hours of Boston, which it is to the minute."

"It" is a 55-acre spread with horse pastures, an intact barn from 1880, and 900 feet of lakefront. After moving in, though, the Carpenters discovered their neighbor. "The plant is very bright at night," Elizabeth says. "It's like a little city over there."

For three years, they lived their dream, tending horses and planting organic gardens. Then, in 2003, they heard about the proposal to burn tires, and their homesteading values quickly turned into activism. Elizabeth now sits on the board of People for Less Pollution, a Vermont citizens' group opposed to the burn plan. Richard, when not in Boston working as a consultant for Internet and software startups, serves as president and treasurer. Their breakfast table is stacked with books and articles about environmental activism, and Elizabeth is quick to hand out buttons and bumper stickers against the tire burn. "I want to be self-sustaining," Elizabeth says. "I'm trying to grow things organically. Sometimes I wonder, Why bother, with all this crap raining down? It gets into the food chain. It gets into our bodies."

There is one problem with her objection to the plant across the lake, but it is a large one: The paper mill was there first. Ticonderoga has been home to a mill since 1882. IP, as the company is locally known, bought the factory in 1925 and operated the original mill until 1970, when a new facility was built several miles north of town.

Papermaking almost always involves placing chemically intensive manufacturing amid otherwise unspoiled settings. That's due to the two primary resources that mills need: trees and water (in IP's case, 16 million gallons a day hoovered from Lake Champlain). International Paper operates in nearly 40 countries with revenues that exceeded $24 billion last year. (The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, buys a fraction of its paper from IP, but none from the Ticonderoga mill.) The Ticonderoga mill sits in an impoverished part of New York state that depends greatly on the factory's well-being. It employs 655 people, including 530 hourly workers who earned $54,000 last year, on average. It does business with another 600 independent truckers and loggers. The mill paid more than one-eighth of the town's municipal taxes last year, $802,000, plus $888,000 for the schools.

But IP is also a major polluter. The mill reported releasing 436,078 pounds of regulated materials into the air in 2004, more than all of Vermont's emission sources combined, including vehicles. The releases were entirely legal under IP's existing permits. However, the plant is among the 10 percent of facilities nationwide that release the most chemicals into the environment, according to Scorecard, a website that collects pollution data and is run by a Washington, D.C.-based environmental watchdog group.

Since the mill opened in 1970, IP has spilled waste water or fuel into Lake Champlain eight times, according to People for Less Pollution. Pipes have broken, collection ponds have overflowed, the landfill has been breached. In 1990, a burst pipe poured landfill leachate into wetlands, where they were trapped by a beaver dam. A Vermonter across the lake called Elizabeth Ready, then a Vermont state senator, to report hearing machinery at work in the dark. "Instead of announcing it - the spill - and bringing in a cleanup team," Ready recalls, "they brought a bulldozer in, in the middle of the night, and breached the beaver dam and released the stuff into the broad water. They put that toxic stuff into the drinking water of one-quarter of the state of Vermont."

The mill's record is typical of intensive manufacturing, says David Struhs, IP's senior vice president of environmental affairs, who works at the company's headquarters in Memphis. "I'm not defending it, and I'm not denying it," he says. "That's the nature of a highly regulated, highly monitored industrial facility." Besides, he adds, IP is now a new company, a more environmentally sensitive one. Since 1992, the mill has invested $75.1 million in pollution-control equipment. Sulfur dioxide emissions are now one-third the 1990 level. Fine particles released in the air by the mill's furnace are down 74 percent for the same period. Meanwhile, the papermaker has conserved thousands of acres of its New York woodlands and committed to sustainable forestry practices.

Yet some observers doubt that the company has reformed. "I'm not buying it," says Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, a consumer and environmental advocacy group. He cites the company's brief test of tire burning in 1997. Many Vermonters claim that IP hid those results, and they were outraged when the records were publicized six years later.

WHILE THE MILL says it wants to run clean, it must also run cheap. Like most American manufacturers, papermakers face increased foreign competition. IP's strategy, outlined last year in announcements to shareholders, is to focus on higher-quality paper, cut costs, and shed underperforming assets. The good news for Ticonderoga workers is that their mill makes a high-quality technical-grade paper used in printers and fax machines - and the market is growing.

So is the financial pressure, though. Ticonderoga mill manager Chris Mallon frequently shows a chart ranking IP's US mills by how much each spends to produce a ton of paper. Ticonderoga is at the top. All of the plants that had higher costs are now closed. "More these mills will go away over the next two or three years," Mallon says. "We're struggling for our very survival." In fact, this year, company officials halved the Ticonderoga mill's capital budget, to $7 million. (By contrast, IP is investing $100 million in a mill in Pensacola, Florida.)

Mallon understands Ticonderoga's predicament better than most. He ran IP's Erie, Pennsylvania, mill until it closed in 2002. After 800 workers lost their jobs, Mallon held on to two keepsake photos. One an aerial shot of the plant in its heyday, steam rising and the parking lot full. The other shows bulldozers blading abandoned buildings like much rubble. "People have to leave town, marriages break up," he says. "We had some suicides. Others died from the extreme stress."

How does the Ticonderoga mill hope to survive? The answer requires a rudimentary understanding of how paper is made: Trees are stripped of bark and ground into chips, which are heated in a soup of chemicals and then run through a series of pressings and treatments until they become rolls of paper.

The whole operation depends on steam. Steam runs the turbine that generates the plant's electricity. Steam powers the 300-foot-long paper machines. Therefore, a crucial financial concern is the price of keeping water boiling. The mill's largest energy source is fuel oil, which cost the company $30.5 million in 2005 - $12 million more than in 2004.

Thus, tires. More specifically, TDF - tire-derived fuel - shredded tires with most of the metal wiring removed.

"This nation produces 300 million scrap tires a year," says Terry Gray, a Houston energy consultant whom the papermaker hired to help with its project. Instead of being discarded, tires now serve in roadbeds and replace gravel in septic systems. With the US Environmental Protection Agency endorsing tire-derived fuel as an alternative fuel, Gray says, about half of reused tires today wind up in a furnace or kiln.

IP has proposed replacing 10 percent of its oil with tire fuel, saving almost $4 million a year. As a first step, the company has applied for a permit from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation to burn tires for two weeks, during which time IP would assess the plant's ability to handle the fuel, and state regulators would monitor resulting emissions.

Burning tire-derived fuel releases metals like mercury and fine particles, or particulates, such as zinc oxide, into the air, and they can lodge deep in the lungs. "Particulate air pollution can affect the cardiovascular system as well as the lungs, triggering heart attacks and strokes," says Rebecca Ryan of the American Lung Association's Vermont chapter. "Lives are shortened not just by days or weeks but by months or years." A two-week test is a hazard in itself, she says. "Even short-term increases in particle pollution are associated with adverse health effects."

In 2004, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement that cited many studies linking particulates and children's illnesses. It called for stronger EPA standards, retrofitting or closing some power plants, and locating new schools away from pollution hot spots.

NEARLY ALL THE ENVIRONMENTAL impact of burning tires at Ticonderoga would occur in Vermont. Nearly all of the jobs potentially saved by reducing the mill's fuel costs would be in New York. Those facts have divided the two states and its residents more than a lake ever could.

The Ticonderoga Chamber of Commerce supports the plan to burn tires, as do the town's supervisor and school superintendent. Gasper DeFelice, a mechanic at the paper mill and president of Local 5 United Steel Workers International, sees no dissent among his members at the factory. "Anything that's going to save this company big bucks is a big plus," he says. US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and US Representatives John Sweeney and John McHugh, all of New York, all back the tire plan.

Vermont legislators are of a different mind. US Senators Jim Jeffords and Patrick Leahy and US Representative Bernie Sanders all denounce the proposal. Teachers and staff at Vermont's Vergennes Elementary School signed a statement urging New York regulators to protect their young students' health. A Vermont farmers' association passed a resolution against the mill's plan "because of the likely increase in heavy metals in the soils and pastureland of the Champlain Valley," the group's director says.

While considering the test permit, New York regulators held a series of public hearings last year in the old armory in Ticonderoga. The group People for Less Pollution filled eight buses with Vermonters to attend one hearing in November. Mill officials arrived at the final hearing in December bearing stacks of letters from employees, all backing the test. While crowds filled rows of metal chairs in the armory's brick-walled basketball court, unlikely public speakers found themselves standing at the microphone.

At the November hearing, Linda Marshall came to the microphone pulling a hand cart with an oxygen tank. "I am dying from emphysema," she said. "I live one street from the IP mill." Between sips of oxygen, she said she spoke against the tire plan on behalf of people with lung diseases. "We don't have the defenses that the normal healthy person has.... The fine particles are a very major concern."

"I represent for the working man and the working class," Patrick Robert McBride of Ticonderoga said at the December hearing. "I work for Christopher Chevrolet. If we lost this mill, we'll lose our business, too. We've been conducting a wasteful energy policy the last 30 years. That's why it has to go to a [tire-derived fuel] policy."

Some opponents of the plan had inched toward a middle ground. They acknowledged the mill's financial straits. They accepted the tire fuel as a potential energy source. But their compromise included an expensive caveat."

I kind of came halfway," says David Carlson, a graphic designer from Whiting, Vermont, who founded People for Less Pollution. "There are benefits for IP if they burn the tires, but they must protect the health of the people in the Champlain Valley. At least install an electrostatic precipitator."

ESPs, as they are known, are pollution-control devices that capture fine particles. "Fabric filters and electrostatic precipitators are preferable for particulate control for TDF exhaust streams," reads the EPA's "scrap tire combustion" policy. According to specialists, every paper mill in the country that burns tires in the volume the Ticonderoga plant has proposed uses an electrostatic precipitator, including several IP mills. But the device's high price tag - IP says it could cost more than $15 million while the group People for Less Pollution says it should cost only $5 million - makes it a serious investment. For now, IP isn't interested in installing the device at Ticonderoga.

At one of the public hearings last year, Vermont Governor James Douglas pushed for more pollution control. "If International Paper is going to burn processed waste tires, they should be required to install the best and most appropriate pollution technology, period," he said. Then he delivered a surprise: "Even though this facility lies outside of Vermont's borders, we are willing to help IP - to an appropriate degree - purchase an ESP if that's what it's going to take."

The offer was never accepted, the governor now says. "We offered them an olive branch, and they burned it."

IP officials say they are open to Vermont's help but want to wait because the two-week test may prove that the existing smokestack is sufficient. "Let's not cheat ourselves by jumping to simple conclusions," says IP's Struhs. "Opinions and predictions and modeling and speculation will be replaced with real information about real performance." In the test proposal, the mill would burn 1/2 ton of tire-derived fuel per hour, gradually increasing to 3 tons. If the measured pollution went too high, regulators and company officials agreed, the test would stop. Yet, Vermont assistant attorney general Erick Titrud argues that this approach inverts the normal permit process. Typically, a business estimates how much its emissions will increase based on other facilities' experiences, and then receives a permit with defined allowances. "You have engineering information about your boiler, you know the content of the fuel, [so] you can reasonably forecast what is going to blow into the air," he says. But the mill wants to burn the tire fuel and see how bad the pollution will be.

Last December, Vermont's attorney general, William Sorrell, filed a challenge to the test with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. New York regulators denied that challenge. Sorrell replied by suing the department and IP on February 7 in New York's Supreme Court. New York law governing tests "applies only to collection of data on existing environmental conditions," the filing argues. "It does not apply to data collection on new actions, such as the test burn, that will result in increased air and water pollution. . .

The mere fact that IP intends to conduct stack tests during the test burn can not and does not transform this proposed major change in the facility's operations into an environmentally benign activity." The suit seeks a temporary restraining order against New York regulators approving the test, while the court weighs whether burning tire fuel is appropriate without an electrostatic precipitator.

Nonetheless, New York regulators are likely to approve the papermaker's request, perhaps as early as this spring, for a simple reason: The mill no longer pollutes to the full extent allowed by its existing permit, issued in 1997. IP's progress on reducing smokestack output has created spare emissions capacity - and that point should make everyone in both states take notice. "It is important to us, having a system with a margin of process flexibility," says Larry Sparks, IP engineer and manager of the boiler operations in Ticonderoga. That buffer, he explains, helps the mill handle daily variations in fuel quality and furnace performance. The cushion also means IP can increase emissions up to 1997 levels without penalty.

The lag is especially meaningful for the fine particles at issue in burning tire-derived fuel. Since 1997, scores of medical studies have established their negative health effects. Yet the EPA only proposed new particulate standards - cutting allowable emissions in half - on December 29, 2005. Turning those benchmarks into permit requirements could take years. "Usually from a draft rule to a final rule is about a year," says Robert Varney, the EPA's New England administrator. "There are sometimes extensions based on the extent of opposition." Final rules then face lawsuits by environmental and industry groups.

Thus IP's test will not even measure the smallest particles released by burning tire-derived fuel, because existing EPA rules only require monitoring larger particles. As for the pledge to stop burning tire fuel if emissions go too high, it means only that IP will not pollute more than its 1997 permit allows.

MOST OF NEW ENGLAND'S air pollution can be blamed on cars and trucks. But smokestack industries in states upwind also contribute a sizable amount. In fact, to protect air quality, Vermont has teamed up with other New England states on at least nine lawsuits against power generators, providers, and regulators.

For example, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont allege in one suit that a coal-fired power plant in Brilliant, Ohio, puts acid-rain pollutants high enough in the air to reach New England. Each state sometimes marches to its own drum, as evidenced in December when Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney decided to bail out of a regional plan to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants. But in all save one suit against upwind polluters, three or more states are pressing the cases together. The states "are of one voice," says Vermont Attorney General Sorrell, "because it affects us all."

If International Paper can take back its share of pollution reduction - can burn tire-derived fuel with impunity by staying within 1997 limits - New England's progress on air quality would be slightly reversed. Should regulators establish that precedent, every licensed emitter would have the paper mill's example to consider as it weighs its own responses to global competition.

"If they get away with this," says Jack Mayer, a pediatrician in Middlebury, Vermont, and an authority on air toxins who's on the board of People for Less Pollution, "it's going to set us back 30 years in environmental toxicology."

Far from feeling bitter or defeated, though, opponents of the tire proposal express unexpected optimism. Elizabeth Carpenter gives her explanation. "I had been fairly depressed about the state of the planet, the war, and everything," she says. "This is something I can do something about. It's frustrating at times, but it's also exhilarating. I'm taking a stand on this."

So there has been creativity in the dissent. Last December, for example, a Middlebury community group held its annual fund-raising gingerbread-house competition. While most families entered home-baked farms and cottages, with gumdrop footpaths and frosted roofs, Weybridge, Vermont, lawyer Eben Punderson and his family assembled something different. In back of their model, titled "Extra Special Present," sat a candy smokestack with licorice tire chunks at its foot and licorice tendrils coming out of the top. On a lake of blue frosting rode Santa, his sled bearing a box labeled "ESP." On the other side of the lake, held aloft by a pretzel stick, stood a sign: "For Sale."

HEATING UP

Environmental battles are brewing across New England. Here are three big ones:

(1) New LNG facilities in Massachusetts

SUPPORTERS SAY: An approved liquefied natural gas terminal in Fall River and proposed terminals in locations such as Boston Harbor's Outer Brewster Island will meet rising demand for natural gas.

OPPONENTS SAY: The facilities would pose a risk to residents of accidents or terrorist attacks or would disturb land worth protecting.

(2) Proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm

SUPPORTERS SAY: Cape Wind's 130 offshore wind turbines, awaiting environmental review by the federal government, could supply three-quarters of the electricity needs of the Cape and islands without polluting the air.

OPPONENTS SAY: The turbines, each more than 400 feet tall, will spoil a natural treasure, ruin views from the shore, and potentially interfere with boat traffic and radar equipment.

(3) Widening I-93 in New Hampshire

SUPPORTERS SAY: Expanding part of Interstate 93 from four lanes to eight would reduce congestion, increase safety, and accommodate anticipated population growth.

OPPONENTS SAY: The plan would increase accidents and noise pollution and disturb wetlands. Some would prefer an expansion of commuter rail instead.

-- Shirley Jobe and Susanne Althoff