Catawba Riverkeeper Seeks to Join Lawsuit Over Waste Storage at New-Indy Paper Mill

The Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation (CRF) said on Thursday that it is joining a lawsuit against the New-Indy Catawba paper mill, which sits roughly 30 miles south of Charlotte in Catawba, South Carolina. The suit claims the mill has violated federal pollution statutes in the way it disposes of and stores waste.

According to a CRF press release, the nonprofit advocacy group, which focuses on the Catawba-Wateree River Basin, has filed a motion to intervene through its representatives at the Southern Environmental Law Center. The motion applies to an existing citizen case against the mill that was filed on Feb. 13. CRF says it hopes its involvement will help secure the cleanup of industrial waste stored on the banks of the Catawba River.

The case, Chin et al v. New-Indy Catawba LLC, centers on alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Other active cases against New-Indy, dating back to May 2021, deal with the odors coming from the mill.

The mill's ownership changed in 2018, when New-Indy Containerboard, LLC and New-Indy Catawba, LLC bought it from Resolute FP US Inc. Both buyers are subsidiaries of Kraft Group, LLC and Schwarz Partners LP. In November 2020, the new owners converted the facility from producing white paper to brown paper containerboard, which increased production and emissions. Nearby residents soon began reporting more air pollutants and overpowering smells.

The groundwater claims stem from testing in October 2022. It found dioxins and a number of other hazardous substances and constituents of concern in groundwater around the mill property, including iron, lead, benzene, trichloroethene and chlorobenzene. Sampling also pointed for the first time to "a likely pathway of exposure" between several spots on the property holding those substances and the Catawba River. Citizens then filed notice of their intent to sue under the two federal laws.

The mill keeps its waste in large, unlined lagoons near the river's banks. A New-Indy emissions litigation website run by interim co-lead class counsel states that nearly 1 million residents of North and South Carolina "have been and continue to be exposed to potential illness-causing contamination through breathing and being generally exposed to the contaminated air and groundwater."

CRF has taken on this kind of fight before. For nearly eight years it led state and federal court litigation over Duke Energy's coal ash storage, and a settlement made Duke responsible for fully cleaning up all of its sites. Duke had already started closing or transitioning its coal-burning plants before 2019. Coal ash, the residue of burning coal for electricity, contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, boron, lead, mercury, selenium and chromium. Improperly stored, it can contaminate waterways, groundwater, drinking water and air, and exposure can cause cancer, birth defects, gastrointestinal illnesses and reproductive problems.

Thursday's release compared the two situations. "Like the millions of tons of coal ash now being excavated from sites along the Catawba as a result of prior litigation, papermill waste is being stored in large unlined lagoons near the banks of the Catawba River," it said. "Our goal is to protect current and future users by requiring the removal of New-Indy's waste from unlined storage near the river."