The good metal? What a billion-dollar Fayetteville titanium plant could cost the environment
When I heard a titanium plant could be built here, my thoughts first went to what will be the environmental impact.
Fresh on my mind is the local (and spreading) groundwater and air contamination from PFAS, or “forever chemicals.” They will have negative effects many years into the future, in spite of a new, more-aggressive federal response to reduce their harm.
More: Pitts: EPA head Michael Regan returns to NC, announces new standards for 'forever chemicals'
Earlier this month, the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners approved $1.3 billion in bonds for a company considering our county among other sites for a titanium reprocessing plant. The company is listed as American Titanium Metal Inc., in the county’s legal notice, published in The Fayetteville Observer.
The facility is expected to bring 500 jobs, paying an average of $125,000, Glenn Adams, chair of the Board of Commissioners, said on Monday.
“Those are real jobs,” he said.
Unanimous vote
The commissioner's unanimous vote May 6 authorizes the Cumberland County Industrial Facilities and Pollution Control Financing Authority to issue $1.3 billion in tax-exempt bonds to American Titanium Metal.
“Neither the County nor the Authority have any liability for the bonds,” the county’s summary of the meeting stated.
The May 6 meeting included a public hearing at which no one spoke, probably because residents did not know such an idea was on the table.
County Attorney Rick Moorefield reminded commissioners at the meeting that no property had been purchased for the project and the company was looking at several other sites.
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But he added of the Cumberland site: “The company has been pursuing this rigorously.”
When Moorefield later partly flubbed the project's cost, saying it was $1 billion, three hundred thousand — Chairman Glenn Adams corrected that it was $1 billion, three hundred million.
Moorefield laughed and said: “I’m not too used to saying that.”
Adams said: “Serious money.”
Battles with PFAS
I do give the commissioners some credit. This board has been on the front lines of the battle over PFAs, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, like GenX, which are used in products like nonstick coating and firefighter foam and and may be linked to harmful health affects in animals and humans.
More: Pitts: PWC, Cumberland County to bring water to Gray's Creek in move that will affect 75,000
Residents in Gray's Creek and near Gray's creek have been on bottled water thanks to groundwater pollution from Chemours, a DuPont spinoff, which operates the Fayetteville Works at the Bladen and Cumberland line. The county has a lawsuit against the company, and also recently announced a partnership with the Fayetteville Public Works Commission to run water lines in the Gray's Creek Water and Sewer District.
In short, I doubt commissioners are raring to jump into another environmental disaster — especially one that is totally within their ability to prevent.
Adams said on Monday that PWC would run water and sewer lines to the facility, if built.
Minimal titanium health risks
It turns out that with titanium, the board might not be courting disaster at the plant, which would be built behind the Goodyear tire processing plant on Ramsey Street.
“Human health risks from titanium and titanium mining are minimal,” according to the United States Geological Survey in a 2017 report on critical mineral resources.
The survey says the low impact is because titanium is “inert in the earth,” in the abstract from the report’s section on the mineral.
Processing titanium does not get a full clean bill of health, however.
“The processes required to extract titanium from titanium feedstock can produce industrial waste,” says the abstract.
Titanium otherwise cuts a good profile in the document, which says it is essential to the “smooth functioning of modern industrial economies.”
The abstract states: “Because of their high strength-to-weight ratio and corrosion resistance, titanium metal and titanium metal alloys are used in the aerospace industry as well as for welding rod coatings, biological implants, and consumer goods.”
A form of recycling
Titanium produces fewer emissions than most metals because of how it is processed, according to online sources. The environmental costs it contains relate to the process of breaking rock to extract the metal. That process is not what will be happening at the Cumberland County plant.
Reprocessing involves remelting titanium scraps. The scraps “are collected and cleaned to remove impurities such as oil and tool fragments. The cleaned scraps are then recycled by remelting,” according to research on advances in recycling titanium published in 2020.
The process leverages one of the lightweight metals chief advantages, that it can be recycled indefinitely.
“If you got a big sheet of titanium, you won’t use the whole sheet,” Commissioner Adams told me on Monday. “You’ll cut it down, and you’ll use whatever you have, but you can take the rest of it recycle it and use it again.”
That means few disposable materials going out into the environment, he said.
Titanium has its advocates in the scientific community.
“I’m a materials scientist, and so people sometimes ask me, ‘What’s your favorite element?’” Andrew Minor, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview for Berkley Engineering in a 2022 article titled, “A New Time for Titanium.” “If you want the strongest material for the least amount of weight, it’s titanium. If we could, we would make everything out of titanium.”
Expense is the issue, he said.
Yes, but no, to chickens ...
In the past, the county has had some big, near misses when it comes to large-scale operations that would have negatively impacted our environment.
In 2015, the commissioners and the Fayetteville City Council each approved by one-vote margins an incentives package for a chicken plant to be built by Sanderson Farms on Cedar Creek Road, east of the city, despite the pleas of residents who flooded into board meetings, including a child named Brayden Brown who spoke at a meeting in February.
“Mr. Brown stated he was nine years old and stated he is concerned about how the chicken plant will affect him, his siblings and his dog,” reported the county’s official meeting notes. “Mr. Brown stated the chicken plant will affect the clear air, produce smells and feathers and contaminate drinking water. Mr. Brown stated the low paying jobs are not worth putting health and quality of life at risk.”
The project was nevertheless scuttled and eventually went to Robeson County because of a delay in a necessary public hearing caused by the single vote of then-Commissioner Charles Evans. Evans would later change his mind but he was right the first time.
... And no to ethanol
The commissioners leaned toward backing an ethanol plant off Ramsey Street in 2007, based on promises of a $200 million payday from the startup company behind it. Public pressure over concerns about smells, dust and congestion eventually caused the company, E85, to pass.
The operation would have converted corn to ethanol — which at the time was a hot energy alternative to fossil fuels. But that bubble has since burst, and who knows what would be the status of that plant now, more than 15 years on.
Conversely, the recycling of titanium is one reason the project qualifies for such a high tax-exempt bond issuance, which is not typical, Moorefield said at the May 6 meeting.
“That’s what makes it a very special project in terms of getting this serious tax consideration,” he said.
Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Titanium to Fayetteville: What impacts could a new facility have?
