Wood Pellet Facility Creates Dust Issue

Wood Pel­let Facil­i­ty Cre­ates Dust Issue

- by Lin­da Rus­sell, Sep­tem­ber 3, 2013. Source: KY3

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.– Grow­ing pro­duc­tion at a pel­let plant in Auro­ra means more jobs.  But peo­ple who live near­by say it also means a lot more saw­dust, so much that it’s hurt­ing air qual­i­ty there.

MFA Oil Bio­mass opened the pro­duc­tion facil­i­ty on Auro­ra’s north­west side about two years ago, but this sum­mer, they ramped up pro­duc­tion, and along with that came clouds of dust.

“You would go out­side in the morn­ing and the air would just be filled with these fine par­ti­cles of saw­dust, and it would like, choke you up to breathe,” says Auro­ra res­i­dent Diana James.

MFA Bio­mass is using saw­dust and turn­ing it into wood pel­lets for wood burn­ing stoves.

“They’re try­ing to con­tain it, but it’s not work­ing,” James says.

James is one of sev­er­al we spoke with who are sick of the dust.  “Today looks fine; they’re not run­ning today,” she says.

MFA Oil Bio­mass was­n’t pro­duc­ing Tues­day, but has been run­ning three shifts a day since June.  They’ve cre­at­ed nine new jobs. 

“It’s the first new fac­to­ry that we’ve had in our town in a lot of years,” says Auro­ra Inter­im City Man­ag­er, David Price.

The City of Auro­ra wants the bio­mass plant to make it, but acknowl­edges the dust issue.  “A lot of dust, a lot of saw­dust.  I came out of there with a lot of saw dust on my feet, but I also under­stood what they were try­ing to do,” Price says.

MFA Oil Bio­mass says they’re work­ing with an air qual­i­ty com­pa­ny and have tried mul­ti­ple changes to their equip­ment, try­ing solve the prob­lem.  “We have an oblig­a­tion to be cit­i­zens of the com­mu­ni­ty and do a good job, but there is a bal­ance.  Obvi­ous­ly, we can only do so much with it in the realms of busi­ness,” says Dustin Dover of MFA Oil Bio­mass.

MFA says their next attempt at con­trol­ling the dust, a fil­ter called a bag house, is on the way.

“Obvi­ous­ly this isn’t a prob­lem we’ve expe­ri­enced in the past, so we weren’t quite pre­pared for it, so the ques­tion is, is it fea­si­ble to do the whole sys­tem and still stay oper­a­tional, peri­od, not just in Auro­ra, but any­where,” Dover says.

James says, “In no way do we want to put any­body out of a job.   That’s not our inten­tions.  We want the saw­dust prob­lem stopped so every­body can live in har­mo­ny around here.”

They city of Auro­ra says MFA isn’t break­ing any city laws, but they are con­cerned for cit­i­zens’ health.  The Mis­souri Depart­ment of Nat­ur­al Resources has been to vis­it, and the city tells us it’s await­ing the agen­cy’s report.