This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
A PVC pipe manufacturer in Woodfin is re-upping promises to help clean up plastics in the French Broad River.
IPEX is giving environmental nonprofit MountainTrue $500,000 for debris cleanup. The company will also work with the town of Woodfin on an engineering study to address flood preparedness. In a separate study, the IPEX will also map the remaining plastic to the Tennessee border.
Jim McAllister, the mayor of Woodfin, said he wants to maintain a positive relationship between the plastics company and the community that’s long relied on IPEX for jobs.
“This was a terribly unfortunate event, and it wasn't just PVC pipe floating down the river. There were caskets, there were dumpsters, there were railroad cars,” McAllister said in an interview with BPR. “So I'm proud of them stepping up and getting it together.”
In 2024, Hurricane Helene flooded IPEX’s riverside storage yard, washing innumerable plastic tubes into the river, where they got stuck under bridges, snarled in tree roots, and settled into the riverbed.
MountainTrue spent the past two years paying local crews to clean up the region’s rivers in canoes and kayaks, picking through and removing almost 6 million pounds of hard-to-reach debris, including many daily hauls of decaying PVC pipe from IPEX.
“The longer it stays in there, the more it breaks down,” MountainTrue deputy director Gray Jernigan said in an interview. “Plastic in the environment breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, and the issue of microplastics is a real one that's being studied more and more every day. So, all to say we just need to get it out as fast as we can.”
Jernigan said the IPEX funding comes after a long campaign to clean up the leftover PVC pipe in the river. Over the past two years, the nonprofit and some officials in the town of Woodfin raised alarms over the company’s slow response to calls for cleanup downstream on the French Broad.
Anastasia Georgakakos, a spokesperson for IPEX, told BPR in a phone call that the company was aware of the
“We understand that perception,” she said. “However, we didn't abandon those recovery efforts and we've been working with MountainTrue over the last few months to try to understand and listen to them and what they've seen in the river as well as collecting our own information.”
She added that IPEX is providing the resources to MountainTrue because the company considers the organization to be experts in river cleanup.
