Europe burns wood pellets. Impacts rise for US communities, forests.
Belinda Joyner has spent most of her life in Northampton County, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. She has raised a family, worked as a teacher’s assistant, and for more than a quarter of a century, fought against what she sees as polluting, outside industries trying to move into her mostly poor, Black community.
Ms. Joyner runs a small, grassroots environmental group called Concerned Citizens of Northampton County. Her group has worked to block a coal ash landfill, a liquid fertilizer plant, a hazardous waste incinerator, a private prison, and perhaps most prominently, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. But these days, she and her small band of activists have a new target – one that has proved both harder to defeat and far more complicated to oppose: the booming biomass, or wood pellet, industry.
The biomass sector is different from other foes. It bills itself
