Buckeye Technologies

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Buckeye Technologies is a Memphis, Tennessee-based industrial company which began in Ohio by the Procter & Gamble Company, and was formerly known as Buckeye Cellulose. The Company was sold by P&G due to increasing negative environmental publicity surrounding it's Foley Florida mill. It (Buckeye Technologies) is one of the larger industrial employers remaining in the Memphis area.

In Perry (Foley) Florida, it's dissolving kraft mill has severely impacted the local ecology. Groundwater has been contaminated, native hardwood and pine forests have been decimated and replaced with corn row slash pine. Wetlands have been drained, native cypress stands logged and ground into landscape mulch. The Fenholloway River, a once pristine body of water, has been completely ruined by the Buckeye Mill's effluent discharge. The Company's well fields extract an estimated 50 million gallons of fresh groundwater every 24 hours, drying up a spring that once supplied a local water bottling facility. This 50 million gallons per day is then contaminated by the pulp mill processes, then discharged into the Fenholloway. Hundreds of acres of once flourishing seagrass beds near the mouth of the Fenholloway have been destroyed by the dark tannin stained effluent. Recent process changes in the mill are reportedly helping this impacted resource somewhat. Time will tell. The mill also spews an awful sulfur smell into the air 365 days a year. All this environmental carnage for a few hundred jobs.

Cool eh?

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