Supporting our communities in North America
As a responsible company, we strive to operate our business in compliance with all legal requirements. By the end of 2024, we will have invested more than $180 million in improving air quality and enhancing operations at our pellet sites since 2022, and are committed to further improvements in our environmental compliance.
Last year, we donated ~$1.55 million to our North American communities and to regions in which we operate, over and above our direct economic impact of over $1 billion. Our NA pellet operations employ over 1,000 colleagues and support over 7,000 others through our operations.
Drax is also committed to enhancing community engagement, including hiring more community liaison officers, who will work in partnership with our neighbors to jointly improve the communities they live in, and that we operate from.
At Drax, we believe in positively impacting the health and well-being of our communities. Improving regulatory compliance and investing in our operations and communities helps us protect the environment where our employees also live and work.
Our commitment is reflected in our operational improvements and investments in emission control technologies, as well as our work to partner with communities, identify their needs and invest in addressing them.
While we have made progress in these areas, we recognize we have more work to do. Below, we provide details on what we’re doing to improve in these areas, and our plans to further invest in our communities in the months ahead.
Miguel Veiga-Pestana, Chief Sustainability Officer
“Our strategic ambitions to become a global leader in both carbon removals and sustainable biomass pellets rightly place focus on the sustainability of the Group’s operations.
“Although we have made significant investment in our operations and communities across our footprint, we can always do more to establish and meet the right standards throughout our operations and in our communities.
“Sustainability in its broadest sense is critical to our success and is core to our strategy and operations.
“The communities in which we operate are a key part of this and we are committed to being a good neighbor and a responsible business.
“We aim to support our communities through strong, local partnerships and clear, transparent communication. We are investing to strengthen our partnerships with our communities as well as making improvements in areas where we operate. We will make further progress on this in 2024 and beyond.”
Highlights of Our Community Approach
- We have established a new overarching community strategy comprising active community engagement with strategic social investment. This strategy is being delivered by a new dedicated Community team, comprising Community Managers in each country. We have also piloted a new Community Liaison Officer in Amite County, Mississippi, with the intention to hire more liaison support officers in other communities we operate in, in 2024.
- The Drax Foundation and our Community Fund have been established as new vehicles for strategic social investment and charitable giving. In 2023, these gave out $3.3 million in grants and local donations, including $1.55 million distributed in North America.
- We believe strongly in partnerships with forestry and sustainability groups to promote biodiversity and ensure Drax’s operations promote healthy forests and positive environmental outcomes. More information about these can be found below.
- We are proud of our continued partnership with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which supports underserved communities and minority landowners access wood fiber markets.
- Our long-term, community engagement strategy is under development and will be finalized in the first half of 2024.
Commitment to Compliance
We strive to comply with all relevant regulation in the places we operate and we engage proactively with regulators to address issues that have been identified at our facilities.
Our pellet production operations are subject to laws and regulations which, for example, limit emissions to the atmosphere and set requirements on the level of self-monitoring and reporting.
We will seek to minimize impacts from pellet mills to surrounding communities. In some cases, this may be through technological upgrades, and in others, we may use nature-based solutions such as planted barriers.
At a minimum, we will seek to ensure 100% compliance with our permits. Where we have previously failed in this regard we will fix this.
We are committed to improvements and have invested in our assets to improve operations and reduce emissions, which we disclose as part of our annual reporting. In 2022 and 2023, we invested more than $47 million and more than $93 million respectively, on improving and enhancing our North America pellet plants. By the end of 2024, we plan to invest $40 million on additional improvements and enhancements.
There are ongoing permitting processes at some of our pellet production facilities in the US, including Gloster, Mississippi and LaSalle, Louisiana. We have ongoing permit update processes across our US operations, and we continue to work with regulators on a routine basis to ensure full compliance.
Our Commitment to the Community in Gloster
In 2021, we installed new technology at the Gloster plant to improve environmental performance. Drax continues to evaluate the operations and maintenance of the process and control equipment. The results of an independent, third-party air toxics impact analysis shows that there are no adverse effects to human health from the facility, and determine that no modeled pollutant from the facility exceeded the acceptable ambient concentration. More details on these matters can be found on the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s website.
During 2023 and 2024, Drax increased engagement with the community in Gloster to better understand the needs of local people. We did this through listening sessions, stakeholder interviews, and meetings with community leaders and traditionally under-represented people from within the community. This helped to inform a community action and engagement plan which is being finalized. A Community Liaison Officer has also been appointed to work with our US Community Manager within Gloster and in the coming months they will work with local residents to create a Community Panel. The Panel will help us to identify local priority issues and projects to be supported with our $250,000 Gloster Community Fund.
Our additional commitments to the community of Gloster include:
- Holding annual town halls to respond directly to community questions and concerns.
- Bi-annual focus groups and/or surveys to understand and address community sentiment.
- Establishing a Community Panel to feed into key decisions.
- Setting up a grievance mechanism to enable community members to report concerns through official channels.
- We have received a letter from the NAACP, which asked us about our operations in Gloster and our commitment to that community. Our response can be read here.
Dogwood Alliance, an activist campaign group, has organized a petition among the Gloster community which was presented to our Board and CEO at our AGM on the 25th April 2024. A copy of our response is available here.
Photo caption: Gloster city officials and Drax colleagues at the announcement of our $130,000 donation to the city to fund a new community walking track
Commitment to Stakeholders
Through open and constructive dialogue, we remain committed to working with a wide range of stakeholders to ensure a better quality of life for our communities whilst also delivering energy security, providing jobs and skills, and playing a critical role in tackling climate change.
Stakeholders, such as NGOs and civil society, play an important role in guiding and enabling companies like ours to drive an equitable and inclusive transition to net zero. We welcome their constructive contribution to discussing the issues which involve our business and the wider energy industry. This also includes how we can best use our resources and programs to assist our communities.
Being challenged on our commitments feeds through to the work we are doing to develop industry-recognized, high-quality methodologies for the issuance of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits from BECCS. More information can be found here.
Another example of this is our response to the ‘BECCS Done Well’ report, an independent report prepared at the request of Drax by a leading UK environmentalist, Jonathon Porritt, and the non-profit organization Forum for the Future. Jonathon Porritt, details the process of working with Drax over the course of two years in his blog which can be found here.
You can read the full ‘BECCS Done Well: conditions for success for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage’ report here and our response with our commitments and approach to BECCS can be found on our Science and Evidence Hub, here.
This supports our ambition to be a world-leading, sustainability-driven company, while holding ourselves to strict sustainability, socioeconomic, and environmental standards.
Commitment to Biodiversity
We have commissioned biodiversity experts to assess our US pellet production catchment areas. As well as providing baseline biodiversity data, these assessments will support target setting, provide insights on opportunities and challenges in monitoring and detecting changes relating to at-risk species and ecosystems.
We are working with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) in respect of a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) grant to improve forest conditions of overstocked hardwood plantings.
In August 2023, we also donated to the Alabama Wildlife Federation (AWF) Land Stewardship Assistance Partnership. The partnership provides on-the-ground wildlife and land management assistance to private landowners in Alabama, providing professional recommendations to more than 1,000 landowners covering almost 405,000 hectares of land.
Drax is a conservation partner of The Longleaf Alliance (TLA) and we support TLA’s mission of being leaders in the restoration, stewardship, and conservation of longleaf pine ecosystems. Since 2019, we have distributed their educational materials to our suppliers which source material from counties that FSC® has identified as “at-risk” for loss of habitat associated with native longleaf pine systems.
You can learn more about Drax and the work we do in renewable energy generation, sustainable biomass pellets and carbon removals here.
