Drax's facilities in Mississippi have been fined millions of dollars for violating state pollution loans.
This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Drax, the British owner of wood pellet plants in Mississippi and Louisiana that has paid millions in fines and settlements for violating state pollution laws in recent years, has received at least $762 million in "green" loans during that same period, an investigation by The Examination, The Toronto Star, and Mississippi Today found. The energy company ships out wood pellets made in North America for other countries to use as a power source to meet their carbon reduction goals. But state regulators in both Mississippi and Louisiana have come down on Drax over its local air pollution. Between penalties and settlements over the last five years, Drax has had to pay out over a combined $5 million to the two states. Since 2018, banks have issued $1.5 trillion in low-interest "sustainability-linked loans," or SLLs, to large corporations to motivate climate-friendly practices. Wood biomass companies, such as Drax, alone received over $76 billion in SLLs between 2018 and 2023, the investigation found using data from the London Stock Exchange and the Environmental Paper Network. Drax received two such loans: one in 2020 that became the equivalent of $553 million — issued by a group of banks including Bank of America, Barclays, and JP Morgan — and another in 2021 equal to $208 million. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How While companies have environmental benchmarks that go with the loans, there's little oversight or public disclosure over what those goals are or whether the companies accomplish them. Drax maintains it has reduced its overall carbon footprint since receiving its SLLs; according to its most recent annual report, the company lowered its carbon emissions by 27 percent from 2020 to 2023. Myrtis Woodard, left, and other Gloster residents talk about…