Late Saturday evening, driving northbound, and treated to an aroma that seemed to be some odd combination of rotting sulfur and dead things. Not quite “downwind from the sewage plant” but in that league, unpleasantness-wise.
This was around mile marker 74 (I glanced at it just after my prayers for death went unanswered). I also glanced over to the left (west) and saw a plume of smoke and a brightly lit large structure in the distance that made me think “power plant”.
Was the power plant responsible? I’ve never noticed an aroma like that associated to a power plant.
What is it about paper mills that makes them smell so badly? I remember being in Berlin, NH (where there is a large one) years ago and being horrified at the stench.
Sulphuric acid used to produce pulp is the culprit. International Paper had a mill in Franklin, VA, and on days with high humidity and wind from the northwest, I could smell it from 25 miles away in my former little corner of NC…
We get used to the smell. But our cars never get used to it, so the paper mill I worked athad a free car rinse station on the way out of the parking lot to get the crud off so it didn’t eat the paint off entirely. I worked in an office in the mill building itself and it wasn’t long before I could eat in there no problem. Sulfuric acid is one thing they use, ammonia is another. Every time they unloaded a rail car of ammonia it reminded me to change the kitty litter when I got home.
Work clothes were dedicated work clothes b/c that smell never comes out of them. And the shoes lived in the garage, they didn’t come in the house.
Paper mills are where the trees (round stock) are so it’s cheaper to get the raw material in, that’s why they wind up stinking up pretty places. Older ones are near rivers as well. Invariably they have train tracks going through them and those are frequently in less-populated places.
What’s weird is I smelled the same thing a couple miles from my house & the only thing industrial in the area is the local quarry & only for a week & a half.
Probably Interstate Paper. They’re a small, independant mill producing 900 tons per day of unbleached kraft. The highway is very close to their 800 acres of lagoons where the wastewater is treated before being discharged.
The plant itself has hardly any smell normally, but at certain times of the year the treatment lagoons can get a bit whiffy. Eau de swamp as it were. Now down in Jesup there’s a Rayonier facility that makes dissolving pulp, which is more of a chemical feedstock than a paper product. Because that uses a pre-cook acid hydrolysis to remove hemicellulose it has an unusual odor for a pulp mill, but I wouldn’t describe it as a stench.
Nope, sorry. The Rayonier plant’s emissions are definitely a stench. When I was a little kid, we’d go fishing at the coast, leaving home at Very Dark o’Clock. Breakfast was always at the Franklinia in Jesup, and Daddy never had to wake us up: the smell did the trick.
And the smell is definitely paper mills, not chicken houses. There’s the Rayonier in Jesup, Union Bag (not anymore, but that’s what us locals call it, I think it may be Weyerhauser now) in Port Wentworth - near Rincon, plus the one down near Riceboro, and one more near 95, I think. Maybe down around Camden County. They’re all about 45 miles apart. And they all stink. Chicken houses have their own distinctive funks, worse IMO than the mills, but usually not as widespread as paper mill farts - a couple of hundred yards of stench, versus several miles.
