B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart for October 29, 2024

They can really stink up the area.

Drive by a fish cannery.

Paper mill in Perry, Florida. ’Nuff said. (PEEUUUU!!)

I didn’t know we started destroying the environment that long ago.

Having lived downwind from the Paper Mill in Washougal WA, I can relate.

Woodfibre, BC. Yes, that’s the correct spelling.

Why are paper mills smelly? Didn’t know that.

That is the smell of the odor coming from the digester, and you know what the digestion process smells like when you have had certain foods to eat.

My husband worked at one & we’d take a big whiff & say the smell of a paycheck….

Cavemen got paper mills!

Anachronism much?

Paper mill in B.C.? Me was never knews.

Paper mills in BC era?

That ain’t nothing compared to a rendering plant.

Chillicothe, Ohio. “That ain’t stink you smell, boy, that’s money.”

Must be near Chillicothe Ohio.

It’s a thing, for sure. I had an uncle that lived in Lufkin, TX for a few years, where there was a paper mill. Loved visiting my uncle, hated the smell the whole time I was there!

Not sure what was worse, the paper mill of the sewer treatment plant across the river in Camas. Paper mill is now closed, so the treatment plant is all you get and it gets pretty ripe.

When I grew up in Bellevue, Washington in the ’60s, Tacoma had a vibrant wood pulp/paper industry. We would encounter it on long family drives, and called it “the aroma of Tacoma.”

I haven’t been back to my beloved Pacific Northwest since ’74, and don’t know what Tacoma is like today. (Though I imagine Bellevue is like the town square in the second Back To The Future movie … all holograms and hoverboards.)

I spent part of my pilot training learning to fly out of the Valdosta Municipal airport. Several miles off the runway was the Clyattville Paper Mill. When the wind was blowing the right way, you could smell it. You could even smell it flying over it at several thousand feet.

I wonder if Valdosta still claims to be the Turpentine Capital of the World and do they still have a Miss Turpentine contest?

My mother lived in Hampton Roads, VA back in the late ’50s. If the wind was from one direction, you got the paper mill. If it was blowing from the other direction you got the fish cannery. You always hoped for a still day.

Another candidate for unexpected unpleasant odors are commercial continuous coffee roasters. We lived one place where we had to drive past a big Maxwell House roaster and it really smelled bad. Still not as bad as a paper mill but definitely not a nice odor.

Paper mills of the past were pretty smelly.

And, on the other side of the coin, we often drove by a big Bread Bakery. Oh, that Wonderful smell! ☺

Oh come now, everyone knows that “He who smelt it, dealt it.”

Chillicothe Ohio

Albany, Oregon has a double hit driving down I-5. The paper mill and a funky metal and alloy producing plant called Wah Chang (really stinky). I had to go work on a computer there once and had to put special covers on my shoes incase I stepped in something that would eat through my shoes. Salem, Oregon had a papermill just outside of the downtown that would spew out a toxic smoke that blanketed the whole downtown, like a fog. Plant is gone now.

Teenage years in Missoula, MT with the papermills in full “bloom” Always knew the direction the wind was coming from. Pig farms in the midwest do cause concern for “who did that?” when we drove past them when the kids were little. A world full of smells – my son says that the funeral pyre smoke isn’t anything you wish to be downwind of. js

when we lived in Arkansas, there was a paper mill about 20 miles from our house, and when the wind came from that direction, it was BAAD.

oh man… I remember as a kid driving through New Hampshire and going by a paper mill… WHOO WEE!

Aah, 1950s memories of family trips to northern Wisconsin. And Green Bay is known as the “Toilet Paper Capital of the World.” It sure smelled that way.

I was born and raised on the Androscoggin River, In the 60s and 70s listed as the 10th most polluted river in the US ,Paper mills from Berlin NH down to Jay Me. Here in Lewiston the smells were aslo from fabric mills , Shoe shops and a old school Gas patch , Quit the smell on a hot day with high runoff the river !

Without paper there would never have been comics!

I lived near a paper mill in Mississippi, when I was a kid. That was a number one sign that you were poor. Those sulfides do stink.

Walk downwind from a yeast plant. Even in winter the creek doesn’t freeze. FYI alcohol is the best those things smell like.

It’s just what you expect a terdel to do. Blame his farts on a paper mill.

…….or drink………or eat and drink??

There was a rendering plant where I grew up in South Burlington Vermont. It was only bad a few days a year but I still remember it 65 years later. They donated use of the beach on Lake Champlain they owned for the neighborhood to use.

A community in Maine had a paper mill and a burning dump near the river and the main route through town. Nobody from outside the community wanted to stop there. Homes near the river painted with white lead oxide turned a dingy grey as the sulfur fumes turned the lead oxide to black lead sulfide.

5 freeway going to Sacramento from LA.

I went to a high school that was just south of a paper mill and fortunately in a state with a predominantly southern wind, but we always knew when the wind shifted to a northerly flow.

In Lewiston, ID I thought it was the mill, but it turns out that it was the compost plant next door.

they only had rock, of rock paper scissors

I experienced first hand what it’s like to live near a paper mill, and the dread of having the wind blow the smoke your way … Not fun … My sympathies to anyone in this predicament.

Where’s Captain Planet when you need him?

I worked two summers at St Regis paper mill in Cantonment Florida and there were definitely times when it was stinky as all get out. They used a lot of sulfates and if they don’t recover them properly — which they didn’t a lot of time — it was rouuuugh. It also would eat a car or a truck up in about 2 years at most.

There are a lot of pulp mills in Sweden. There is a poem from the early days of that industrialization which goes ‘Sulfite smells like poop, but opposite, Sulfate smells like food, but opposite’ (Sulfit luktar skit fast tvärtom, Sulfat luktar mat fast tvärtom) mirroring the two pulp-making processes.