The Smurfit-Stone Story

Why was there a pulp mill to begin with, and why in this location?

If you drive toward Frenchtown on Mullan Road, you’ll notice just before you hit Pulp Mill Road a large, industrial, “almost apocalyptic” site – as Commissioner Strohmaier describes it – with little to no vegetation and vacant, rundown infrastructure. This is Smurfit-Stone Mill, a 3,200-acre pulp mill that operated from 1957 until its bankruptcy in 2010, leading to 417 layoffs.

This mill, originally owned by Hoerner Waldorf Corporation, co-existed with a booming logging industry in Missoula County at the time. The mill took smaller trees, limbs or other materials that weren’t being used for lumber or other wood products and turned them into pulp for paper or craft products, such as the Kraft liner paper for the outside of cardboard. In 1957, the location and purpose of this mill seemed like a great idea. It was next to the Clark Fork for easy disposal of waste (an idea we may cringe at now), and it was a way to use excess products from the logging industry and turn them into a profit.

When did contamination begin, and how much of the site is contaminated?

Only one year after the mill started operating and dumping waste into the Clark Fork, large numbers of fish died downstream, foam appeared and the water became discolored. To address this, the mill’s owners created wastewater and sludge ponds to keep the waste separate from the Clark Fork (kind of – unless there was high water, in which case the wastewater would discharge into the Clark Fork. Also, keeping the water in unlined ponds allowed the wastewater to move into the groundwater, which is not ideal). As more environmental standards came into effect in the 1960s and ‘70s, additional steps, such as aeration basins and a clarifier, were added to help contamination drop out before being discharged to the Clark Fork River or via infiltration to groundwater. Berms to make ponds and separate the site from the river had to be repaired multiple times with dump truck loads full of rock.

For scale, the industrial section of the mill covered about 100 acres, and over 900 acres of the site contain the unlined wastewater and sludge ponds (that’s nearly 682 football fields, just over four University of Montana campuses, or nearly double the acreage the City of Missoula owns in parkland). In addition, there were 193 acres of sludge and garbage dumps.

At its peak, the mill processed 1,900 tons of treated paper products each day. For 39 of the 50 years of the mill’s operation, bleach was used, which resulted in toxins being released into the water and soil.

What exactly are the contaminants in the soil and water at Smurfit Stone, and how bad are they for consumption?

The toxins being released included dioxins and furans, which are “hydrophobic” chemicals, meaning they don’t break down easily in water. Instead, dioxins and furans bind to “lipids,” or fats, like those found in insects, fish and mammals. As these substances travel up the food chain, they are magnified by each successive animal that consumes them. This can lead to high concentrations of dioxins and furans in tissue, which has been known to cause cancer in lab studies. Another type of contaminant at the site are heavy metals like manganese and arsenic (a quick Google search can show you just how toxic these can be for consumption).

Who owns the site, and who is supposed to pay for the cleanup?

The original owners were Hoerner Waldorf Corporation, a popular paper products company, but the current ownership is a bit more complicated (see below). When the mill closed in 2010, Missoula County, residents in Frenchtown and other stakeholders like Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes asked the EPA to look at the site and determine if it should be added to the National Priority List, which is the list of the most contaminated sites in the United States that should be prioritized for cleanup. Following bankruptcy proceedings, portions of Smurfit-Stone were owned by International Paper and WestRock, and when they were given their options by the EPA on how to do the site cleanup, rather than have the site added to the National Priority List, they agreed to follow the Superfund process.

What is the Superfund process?

The Superfund process was established in the 1970s after certain toxic waste dump sites started to receive national attention once the public learned about the risks they posed to human health and the environment (think the Love Canal in New York). Congress’s response was to establish the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980. “Superfund” is the informal name for “CERCLA.” The basic idea is that a Superfund allows the EPA to oversee the cleanup of contaminated sites and force the parties responsible for the contamination to either perform the cleanup or reimburse the EPA for doing it. And if there is no one around anymore to help pay for the cleanup, the EPA can pull from a large fund to pay for it (hence the name “Superfund”).

So, why is it taking so long, and, again, who should pay for it?

The Superfund process has many steps that take time, and in Smurfit-Stone’s case, the process isn’t that simple.

In 2011, most of the Smurfit-Stone site was acquired by M2Green Redevelopment LLC, an affiliate of Green Investment Group, Inc., whose mission was to acquire and redevelop Brownfield sites throughout North America. The EPA has been asking the potentially responsible parties, which includes M2Green, to do testing and cleanup on this site, which requires back and forth negotiations between the EPA and PRPs, and this is further complicated by the fact that M2Green is now bankrupt and very delinquent on their taxes. So, you can see how it would be difficult for the EPA to obtain funds from M2Green to pay for the cleanup at Smurfit-Stone.

And as we know, if a large corporation like M2Green is delinquent on their taxes (we’re talking by around $500,000 – the total delinquent taxes owed on the site between all the owners is $750,000), this affects the residents who then must foot the bill for upkeep on their community’s infrastructure. Missoula County went to court in 2017 to attempt to collect the taxes to recoup the costs for the Frenchtown School District, Missoula County and the Frenchtown Rural Fire District, but the races are still going unpaid.

How is Missoula County involved, and where are we at in the process now?

Though Missoula County is not in charge of the cleanup at Smurfit-Stone, we do act as a steward for the residents of the area, and public health is our largest concern. With the contaminants from the mill so close to the Clark Fork and groundwater, and with the berms meant to contain the contaminants slowly degrading because of the flow of water and channel migration, a flood or high-water event could have the potential to completely wash away the berms and seriously contaminate the Clark Fork and groundwater. And as shown earlier, we do not want to consume these toxins, so we need to get to cleaning up this site as soon as possible.

This is all further complicated by the fact that in 2018, the EPA concluded and were satisfied with their sampling of the site, but Missoula County found in the reports that it was apparent they had not considered historical information or sampled areas like settling ponds or areas containing 55-gallon drums of pulp manufacturing fluid. So, Missoula County, along with the Frenchtown Smurfit-Stone Community Advisory Group and trustees like the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, Montana Natural Resource Damage Program and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, pushed for more sampling. There wasn’t much headway at first, but with a new EPA Regional Administrator for this area, the County reached out again in 2022 and the EPA agreed to perform more sampling. Though this is a step forward to thorough site cleanup, it still pushes the timeline for potential cleanup to begin back to 2028. This is where we’re at now.