Forestry Report A PUBLICATION OF F&W FORESTRY SERVICES, INC.
SUMMER 2025 | NO. 165
Rural South Reeling From Pulp Mill Closures, Could Changes To RFS Rules Revive Rural Communities? By Marshall Thomas, President of F&W Forestry Services, Inc.
The recent closure of a pulp mill in Cedar Springs, Ga., got me thinking about the human impact of these mill shutdowns. Cedar Springs is a town of about 75 people. Early County, where it sits, has a population of around 10,000, half of whom live in Blakely, 16 miles from the mill. The mill employed over 500 workers, so this is a massive blow to Early County. The hit to the tax base will be damaging to schools, public services, and roads, and will likely result in city and county job cuts. It doesn’t end there. The mill relied on many loggers to supply their wood. Now, with nowhere to send their harvests, more jobs will be lost, and bankruptcies are likely. We’ve seen this story unfold before. It happened a few years back in Perry, Fla. Last December in Georgetown, S.C. Across the Southeast, similar shutdowns have hit communities hard. In larger cities, the impact is more muted, but it’s still there. In rural places like Cedar Springs and Perry, the consequences are profound. The rural South recovered from the Great Depression, in large part, riding the explosion of pulp and paper mills across the South. Roughly 100 mills were built between 1930 and 1977, driving employment and local economies. But now, due to changing markets, lack of reinvestment, failure of some industry players to innovate, and government policy, we are losing this industry. Meanwhile, as pulp and paper production is declining in the U.S.,
it is expanding overseas. Combined with the current struggles in agriculture, this paints a troubling picture for the rural communities. We have abundant forests. Trees are a renewable “green” raw material. We can deliver them to mills at competitive prices. So why aren’t more industries flocking to the South to turn our trees into the green products the world is demanding? One reason is the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The RFS requires transportation fuel sold in the U.S. to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. When first enacted in 2005, the EPA allowed commercially-grown trees to be used for renewable energy, much like corn for ethanol. But when the RFS was expanded in 2007, the EPA changed the rules, effectively excluding whole trees and limiting eligible wood feedstocks to forest residuals and first thinnings. This single regulatory shift derailed major opportunities. For example, Georgia Power scrapped plans to convert a coal plant east of Cedar Springs to a wood-and-coal cofired facility—a project that would have created another significant market for wood, along with jobs and tax revenue. Instead, government policy chose corn over plantation-grown Southern pine as a renewable fuel source. This is a local story, but it is also playing out across the South, echoing the decline once seen in the Rust (continued on page 4)
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Disaster Reforestation Assistance
EUDR Developments
States Target Carbon Programs
Washington Update
New Sawmill Planned For S.C.