by Joshua Berry
Chile Program Director, Save the Waves Coalition
www.savethewaves.org
www.proplaya.cl

Tom and I are at the Nueva Aldea pulp mill for a tour. Tom is a surfer from the United Kingdom who is an expert in large factories and their engineering. He's here on a round-the-world trip and offered his services to Save the Waves Coalition. We enter the executive offices of Nueva Aldea and are greeted by a public relations lady in a conference room dominated by a giant wooden table with fresh bottled water, coffee, tea and cookies. The floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a neighboring vineyard and a perfectly manicured lawn. Ivan the plant's public relations manager greets us with two engineers in tow: the engineer responsible for the mill's effluent discharge into the Itata River, and the engineer who oversees for the construction of the mill's 50-kilometer pipeline being built to the sea.

I immediately tell them that I am an environmental activist with Save the Waves and Proplaya and that we are totally against the construction of the pipeline to the sea. I recount our street protests in Santiago in front of Celco's offices, and of the protests in June in front of this very mill. They laugh nervously yet are relaxed, with only a little political tension in the air! I see a digital projector, a laptop and lots of fancy paper folders with well-lit glossy photos of trees and happy kids and brand-new industrial equipment. Next I warn them that we must keep the office presentation to a minimum and what we really want to do is go out "en terreno" and see the mill operations firsthand. After 20 minutes of slides and conversation we finally get our wish and they take us outside where we put on white hardhats, steel-toed boots and safety glasses. Ours and our hosts' hardhats are white; Tom notes that the workers doing the physical labor are all wearing blue or green hardhats.

During the office presentation I learn some useful details that I did not know before: this mill produces plywood from pine trees and construction-grade lumber from pine trees (mostly 2x4 and 4x4 beams), in addition to Kraft paper pulp from eucalyptus. Part of the solid waste produced in the manufacturing process is burned as biomass and used as energy - the mill is entirely energy efficient and sometimes sells excess electricity back to the grid. The rest of the solid waste is dumped at a nearby "certified" landfill. I'd like to analyse that waste for its ingredients, and see the conditions of the dump. The mill's main client for all of these products is China. The United States and Europe are other major buyers, including the world's largest manufacturer of wooden pallets for shipping and storage. In China, much of the lumber is used for manufacturing furniture which is then sold to the United States, Asia and Europe. The Kraft paper pulp is used to manufacture high-quality white paper products such as office paper, magazine paper, sanitary products and high-quality packaging.

Our first stop "en terreno" is a water treatment facility. It is giant: at least four city blocks of holding tanks, treatment tanks, concrete, giant steel pipes and other equipment. Stinking dark-brown foamy water is sent from the production facilities to this place where it passes through a cooling tower (to be cooled down from 35 degrees Celcius) and enters three treatment processes including filtering, settling and bacterial digestion of certain solids and chemicals. This plant reeks of sulfur and other chemicals that are used in the cleaning process. After 15 minutes my stomach aches and my eyes are beginning to burn. Our hosts tell us that the latest technology eliminates most of the odors associated with the production and waste treatment, but I'm definitely smelling some horrible smells.

As we follow the water treatment process the water gets cleaner and less stinky. At the end of the line, before the water goes into the 1.4-meter-diameter pipeline to the river, the water is clear and odorless. They offer us a cupful but we decline. I'm not very thirsty. I ask the plant's environmental manager if this water is similar to the water in a swimming pool. He smiles and says, yes, it is just like swimming pool water. I comment that one doesn't see fish, river life or sea lions swimming and living in swimming pool water. He agrees with me with a "yes, that's true...", but stumbles to add that such creatures "often live in water much dirtier." OK, Mr. Expert.

We then drive the length of the underground pipeline that's now dumping this water into the river. Or at least that's what they tell me, because I can't exactly see it under 10 feet of dirt. At the river's edge we encounter a giant hole in the ground with a grate over it and a ladder leading down into it, just like the grates you walk over on city sidewalks that ventilate the underground subway. At the bottom of this is a small river of water that then goes out into the middle of the river via another big pipe. The 50-km pipeline is being constructed from this point towards the ocean, on an old railroad right-of-way. 50-meter lengths of giant black HDPE pipe lie on the ground in perfect piles waiting for installation to lead to our ocean.

Stay tuned for our educated analysis of this visit and of the private and government reports on the water treatment facility and the pipeline!

My visit and tour of the offending pulp mill
by Joshua Berry, Chile Program Director, Save the Waves Coalition

Tuesday, November 21, 2006.

The train ride out of Santiago is gorgeous but not very fast. As I sit in my seat I watch skyscraping Andes mountains as a vertical wall to my left; in the foreground are vineyards, small snowmelt rivers, giant monoculture agricultural fields dotted with roaming horses; the distant coastal mountains to my right contain the millions of acres of Oregon pine and Australian eucalyptus that feed Chile's infamous forestry industry. At 7 AM the train is full of affluent agricultural engineers and winemakers talking on their cell phones as they travel to their fields from Santiago for the day. These guys are the scientists and managers behind the mass-produced wines, table grapes, oranges, tomatos, apples and asparagus that arrive jet-set fresh to your local supermarket during the northern hemisphere winter. Their prime export season is just now beginning.

But this is not a tourist brochure nor an article for Travel & Leisure; I've watched this gorgeous landscape pass by at 80 KPH a thousand times before; today I meet my nemesis, "Complejo Forestal e Industrial Nueva Aldea" (Nueva Aldea Forestry and Industrial Complex): a US$1.3 billion-dollar city of industry built to produce what we all want more of: bleached paper kraft pulp, cheap lumber and plywood. And your newspaper, office fax, surf magazine or bathroom remodel will soon contain some product from this very place. Chile's trees grow three times faster than the same tree grown in North America. Who can argue that they don't have the right to produce such a much-needed product?

Five hours later after getting off the train I get in a car and drive another 50 km southwest to what was once a small rural village. Now the village has a rather large new neighbor that is constantly lit up with 300 giant floodlights and 200-foot-tall vapor-spewing smokestacks. Vineyards still border the edges of the pulp factory. One of them is an organic vineyard, and this year 80,000 bottles of its wine was rejected by Swedish authorities because of its proximity to the new pulp mill.

I approach the heavily guarded gates (site of many citizen protests, including a Greenpeace stunt in late June of this year in which four climber activists, one of them a surfer, hung a giant banner reading, CELCO: ENOUGH POLLUTION ALREADY) and I announce my name to the rent-a-cop. This time I am not holding a protest placard; this time I am an invited guest of the Plant Manager and the guard waves me through with subservient authority. What rhetoric will I be showered me with today? How will the beast be painted by its human custodians? I suspect the "local jobs and economy" argument will be heavily promoted. I merely have a few pointed questions to ask, and a strange desire to stare deeply into that chlorine- and sulfur-spewing cauldron of industrial ingenuity. Some people come to Chile to walk for days to stare into sulfur- and toxin-spewing volcanoes. Is my journey today that much different? Ultimately I seek self-knowledge and redemption, and getting to know my enemy helps tremendously in getting to know myself. Today I am the lotus flower: growing in mud yet undefiled by it.

Next blog: the public relations slide show and the very stinky water treatment plant...

Visit www.savethewaves.org and www.proplaya.cl for further information and photos of our Chile project.

“The ocean has an infinite capacity to absorb our industrial waste.” – Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, February 2005, Santiago, Chile.

“It’s very likely that local people will die to keep Celco from building their pipeline into the ocean. We the local fishermen are passionate and organized against this pipeline and we will sacrifice our lives to protect our future and our environment. This is my life and I support my children and my wife from what the ocean gives me – without the health of the ocean and its fauna, I am dead already; I promise that I will not sell out the health of this ocean to the toxic and corrupt paper industry.” – Gino, fisherman & artisan fishing community organizer; July 2006, Mehuin, southern Chile.

There is a ten-year recipe for social action in Mehuin, Chile. In Valdivia, the site of a Celco pulp mill pollution scandal in 2005, Celco plans on building a 50-mile-long overland pipeline to dump its pulp waste directly into the Pacific Ocean near Mehuin. The local fishermen are up in arms, and since 1996 they have done something about it. Before I delve into a brief history of the unfolding drama, allow me to quote some of the news headlines from last week’s confrontation between Celco (who attempted to map the ocean floor site), the Chilean navy (who attempted to protect Celco from the local fishermen), and 40 local fishing boats (who successfully harassed Celco and the navy into leaving without gathering their ocean floor contour data).

“The Southern Ocean’s Secret War” – Diario El Gong, July 27, 2006.
“Celco Fails in EIR Bid After Fishermen’s Actions” – Diario El Gong, July 26, 2006.
“Neighbors Question Government’s Support of Celco” – Koala Web, July 26, 2006.
“Navy Launches Warship to Protect Celco Scientists” – Diario del Sur, July 26, 2006.
“Navy Defends Actions and Claims to Not Protect Celco” – Diaria del Sur, July 26, 2006.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVENTS: In 1996, Celco seemed to understand that its pulp mill would irreversibly pollute the Rio Cruces / Valdivia watershed because they got approval to build a pipeline to dump their waste into the coastal waters of Mehuin, a small artisan fishing community near Valdivia. The “Ocean Defense Committee” was formed by local fishermen to stop this project; they protested via massive demonstrations, burning 3 police motorcycles and one paddy wagon and succeeding in tabling the pipeline proposal. Ricardo Lagos, president of Chile until 2006, reinitiated the subject in 2005 claiming that “a waste pipeline to the ocean is the only solution, since the ocean has an infinite capacity to absorb industrial waste.”

After the green light from the president of Chile, Celco reinitiated its geographic studies of the region for the construction of its pipeline. The fishermen of Mehuin followed closely, and in December 2005 shots were fired across the bow of a Celco boat by local fishermen as scientists attempted to take depth soundings, ocean bottom contours and water samples. Celco fled the scene without achieving its aims, but returned last week with an escort: a warship from the Chilean navy. Dozens of riot police descended on the small town of Mehuin to control the situation and electrical power to the town was cut.

Nevertheless, over 40 small fishing boats congregated at the scene in heavy seas and torrential rains; they harassed the Celco and navy boats to such an extent that Celco and the navy again left the scene without succeeding at collecting their data.

That old curse, “may you live in interesting times” seems to be evident here.