Georgia-Pacific in the Media
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This is a roundup of coverage of Georgia-Pacific in the Media that was started Friday, May 6, 2011.
Recent Articles, in reverse chronological order
Erik Olson - Daily News 5/3/11 LONGVIEW, Wash. (AP) — Union workers at Georgia-Pacific's Wauna mill in northwest Oregon have given negotiators strike authorization as contract talks with the company have bogged down, a union representative said Monday.
The 900 members of the United Steelworkers local 1097 have been working under a contract that expired in April 2010, said Gaylan Prescott, the union's staff representative. The union voted down a company contract offer in January, and the next contract talks are scheduled May 24 with a federal mediator, he said....
Kalamazoo Gazette 4/28/11 PLAINWELL -- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency representatives offered an update Wednesday night on the work they plan for this year and in coming years to clean up the 80-mile Kalamazoo River Superfund site.
But to many in the audience in a conference room of a Plainwell hotel, the presentation was mostly talk with little action.
"This is pretty much their standard stuff," said Gary Wager, executive director of the Kalamazoo River Cleanup Coalition.
The presentation, attended by about 40 people, was "discouraging," Wager said, because it appears that the only company currently paying for the cleanup, Atlanta-based papermaker Georgia-Pacific LLC, is being allowed to conduct more studies rather than remove harmful polychlorinated biphenyls from the river....
Steven Mufson - Washington Post 4/26/11 The paper industry — which in 2009 raked in billions of dollars in federal subsidies originally intended to promote alternative highway fuels — is now using a different biofuel tax credit to cut its tax bills for 2010 and beyond by hundreds of millions of dollars more.
The heart of the issue is the tax treatment of a substance called “black liquor,” a byproduct of the wood-pulping process at paper mills. The companies have burned black liquor to generate power since the 1930s....
Another company that could qualify for the subsidy is Georgia-Pacific, whose parent company, Koch Industries, is owned by the conservative Koch brothers. Because the company is private and doesn’t disclose its results, it isn’t clear whether Georgia-Pacific claimed the credit....
Virginia Chamlee - Florida Independent 4/22/11 The controversial pipeline that would reroute a Georgia-Pacific paper mill’s waste into the larger St. Johns River has long confounded environmentalists in the area. Now, a noted engineer says the pipeline wouldn’t just harm the river, but it may even potentially hurt Georgia-Pacific’s bottom line.
Moving pollution from one point to another seems an odd solution to correcting the environmental damage that has been wrought in Rice Creek, and yet that is essentially what the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has proposed in Palatka, Fla., the home of a Georgia-Pacific paper mill....
Mike Ivey - Capital Times 4/14/11 Right or wrong, Koch Industries has served as the bogeyman for all the evil doings of the Walker administration.
Sometimes there's no smoking gun -- like the new state contract for copy paper with Koch-owned subsidiary Georgia-Pacific, which was awarded while Gov. Jim Doyle was still in office.
But this new report from the liberal ThinkProgress.org offers some insight into Gov. Scott Walker's call for delaying implementation of tougher water pollution laws in Wisconsin....
Kyle Daly - Florida Independent 3/21/11 As Georgia-Pacific continues to fight Florida environmental groups and the state Department of Environmental Protection over the waste that it dumps into the Sunshine State’s rivers and streams, the paper company may be headed for similarly heated battles elsewhere....
The Ouachita Riverkeeper, which strives to maintain the quality of the Ouachita River as it snakes through Arkansas and Louisiana, has alleged that Georgia-Pacific is destroying the Ouachita ecosystem by flooding the river with waste in violation of regulations that have already come under attack in the past for being too lax....
Kyle Daly - Colorado Independent 3/1/11 ... This month, Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform published a report critical of federal regulatory practices that it considers “impediments to job creation.” The report several times singles out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an entity whose regulations create costs for small businesses that inhibit job growth. Given the committee’s Koch connections, it may come as little surprise that its report targets the EPA, as Koch Industries has come into repeated conflict with federal and state environmental protection agencies. The most recent flare-up between Koch Industries and environmental regulators comes in the form of a battle between Koch Industries-owned Georgia-Pacific Paper and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection over a wastewater pipeline Georgia-Pacific wants to route into Florida’s St. John’s River.
The Watchdog report demonstrates that the parallels between the House committee’s criticisms and Koch Industries’ clashes with federal and state regulators certainly may not be mere coincidence. At least six Republican staffers with the Committee on Oversight have demonstrable corporate lobbying connections, according to the Watchdog Institute. Additionally, 11 of the 23 Republican representatives in the committee received financial help from Koch Industries in the last election....
Virginia Chamlee - Florida Independent 2/14/11 Weeks after unveiling its “Cleaner GP” campaign, the St. Johns Riverkeeper has unveiled a comprehensive analysis of the Brown and Caldwell study originally used to justify paper giant Georgia-Pacific’s controversial wastewater pipeline.
The Brown & Caldwell report concluded that a pipeline rerouting effluent from Georgia-Pacific’s Palatka mill into the much-larger St. Johns River would be the only hope for the paper company to meet water standards in Rice Creek, where the Palatka mill sits.
Environmentalists have long argued that the pipeline would further wreak havoc on the St. Johns, which is already inundated with symptoms of nutrient pollution. Georgia-Pacific waste contains both nitrogen and phosphorus, which often lead to toxic algal blooms and fish kills.
In an effort to dissuade the Florida Department of Environmental Prtoection from its approval of the pipeline, the Riverkeeper hired Lakeland-based Hayes-Bosworth Inc. to conduct a peer review of the Brown & Caldwell study. In a letter summarizing the study(.pdf), Robert Hayes remarks that the study was deficient and that there are indeed viable alternatives to the pipeline....
Virginia Chamlee - Florida Independent 9/13/10 If its past is any indication, Georgia-Pacific certainly isn’t the environmental stalwart its website (.pdf) would have you believe. In 1995, the company allegedly lobbied members of Congress to avoid installing pollution gear at several of its plants. In 1996, the company settled a dispute with the EPA, agreeing to pay $26 million in environmental improvements in eight Southeastern states, including Florida. In addition to those improvements, the company was ordered to pay a $6 million fine to the U.S. Treasury. Georgia-Pacific has also been fined (.pdf) in the past for violating regulations of effluent waste in Canadian waters.
In North Florida, Georgia-Pacific is a well-known polluter of Rice Creek, a tributary of the St. Johns River. Unfortunately for the Palatka community and the Rice Creek ecosystem, there are few regulations in place to slow the mill’s effluent waste. An examination of the priorities of Georgia-Pacific’s owners suggests why.
A previous article written for The Florida Independent looked at the relationship between U.S. Rep. Ander Crenshaw, R-Jacksonville, and Koch Industries, the parent company of Georgia-Pacific. Koch donated $5,000 to Crenshaw’s 2008 campaign and, in late June, he and fellow Florida Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Tallahassee, proposed a rider that would cut off funding to the EPA, preventing proposed water quality standards from going into effect....
