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Articles by Alex Rozier, Mississippi Today

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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 P... Read more