There’s a back story to this: a bill has been hung up in legislation for months now that would assist businesses like ours seeking alternative, “green” fuel sources. Originally labeled the “Alternative Fuel Tax Credit,” it was part of the 2005 Highway Bill. As proposed, it would provide a 50-cent tax credit for every gallon of alternative fuel we use to heat our plant and machinery. FiberMark, in conjunction with some of the businesses that are providing us with WVO, requested a meeting with Congressman Welch and other legislators to see if we could help promote the green movement and speed along the bill’s passage. The tax incentive is attractive to us, of course, but not only because it means fuel cost reductions. As a company, we are completely committed to developing and employing green, energy-saving technologies, and this one fits perfectly with our vision and mission.

Here to greet Congressman Welch were FiberMark’s president, Anthony MacLaurin, and other members of our senior management team. During the tour, we talked to the congressman about our “WVO” campaign, as well as our efforts to move away from using virgin pulp, replacing it with recycled materials. Welch happens to be extremely environmentally friendly, and was very interested in what we’re doing in that regard. Later, in a letter to us, Welch said, “Very impressive operation. Your ideas about the environment, recycling protocol and other energy-efficient innovations . . . could provide wonderful opportunities for the Vermont economy and serve as a model for the emerging green sector in our state.” The outcome is that he has vowed to help get this important bill passed.

Equally important, though, is the fact that our Brattleboro plant has the ability—and the desire—to replace all of our fossil fuel needs by burning WVO. That’s an indication of how serious we are about our green efforts. It’s a stake we’ve planted in the ground. Needless to say, the 50 cent tax credit will help our costs considerably, so we’re rooting for Congressman Welch in his efforts to get the bill passed.

In that beautiful ocean-side setting, I was thinking about how tragic it would be if the Maine coastline had suffered the same fate as the Gulf shore along Louisiana’s coast, in the wake of the BP oil spill.  Here I was in this picture-postcard setting, and it was almost unimaginable to think about something like what happened in the gulf happening in Maine.  That led to my thinking about the impact of that oil spill:  how it’s changed perhaps a thousand years of natural history down there, and taken people’s livelihoods from them.  Birds and wildlife, shellfish and sea creatures, tourism—what it’s taught us is that it can all be gone in an instant.  It’s going to take years to bring it back, if it’s actually possible to bring it back to its original state.

You can’t possibly put a value on the loss.  How can you assign a dollar amount to someone’s livelihood?  For many people down there, it’s the way they were programmed—it’s all they’ve ever done, from generation to generation.

It made me realize how lucky we Vermonters are to live in a part of the country where the preservation of the environment is such a priority, and so conscious a part of our daily lives.  And it reaffirmed my pride in working for a company that places such a high value on the environment as FiberMark does.

The primary grade we purchase from Yank is called “Sorted White Ledger,” which is a post consumer grade consisting of uncoated, printed or unprinted white papers sorted from the waste stream, as well as “Hard Whites,” which consist of shavings or sheets of unprinted white paper.  Recently Yank offered us a grade of Sorted White Yellow Ledger.   Oddly enough, this yellow-sheeted material is derived from used aptitude test manuals printed on yellow paper.

It’s also good to know, of course, that all of these materials represent a great cost savings for FiberMark-cost savings that we can pass on to our customers.  Equally important, is the fact that by using these materials FiberMark is also playing a role in helping to keep our landfills cleaner.

I’ve been with FiberMark for 27 years.  My home is in Keene, New Hampshire, right across the Connecticut River from Brattleboro, although I was born and raised in the small town of Wardsboro, Vermont.

Vermont isn’t a particularly industrialized state, and, as a result, people here have had a lot of hardships through the generations.  But those hardships have made us hard-working and frugal, and, because we haven’t had a lot, it’s in our nature to conserve.

And with conservation in mind, the WVO project is a real winner.  I’m happy that management here has given us is the freedom to blend the mixture of WVO and Number 6 oil that we burn.  We do that according to what amounts of WVO we can collect from neighboring towns and cities and what we have on hand—some days we burn maybe 30 percent WVO as a percentage of our overall mix, and other days it’s 40 or 50 percent.

There’s another aspect of our focus on energy conservation.  When we make paper for our products, we bring in water from the river through our sand-filtered system.  If we bring it in during the summer, that water temperature is already around 70 degrees, so it means that we have to heat the water that much less—and, of course, burn less fuel in the process.  In the winter, we bring the water in from our deep well, and that’s consistently 50 degrees.  So, again, we’re always making adjustments to try and decrease our plant’s operating “carbon footprint” as we refer to it nowadays.

The goal is simple:  a cleaner burn with fewer emissions.  It makes sense, and it’s right in keeping with the Vermont tradition of conservation we’re trying to uphold.  A lot of people may not be aware of it as yet, but it’s becoming a FiberMark tradition to.

Every spring, we would toy with different varieties of tomatoes and have contests to see who could raise the biggest or the juiciest or the most flavorful. Here in Vermont, it’s a little different. Tomatoes are a bit more difficult to grow and don’t seem to have the acidy “bite” of some of the heirloom varieties we used to grow back home. Back in Indiana, we would set our plants out on Mother’s Day and things would pretty much finish up by early fall. Here, though, I’ve been absolutely amazed at the length of the growing season. Back in Indiana, we were done eating fresh sweet corn by Labor Day. But here in Vermont last year I had local sweet corn on October 18th which, incidentally, was also the date of the first snowfall!

I have three daughters and I’m happy to say they all followed their dad’s interest in gardening. One year, along time ago, we set out to raise a giant pumpkin. We ended up taking all the pumpkin plants out but one and we then focused on that one to nurture it to help it grow. It didn’t end up being massive, about 141 pounds, but in an old photo, there’s my three daughters sitting on that big old pumpkin! It’s something I treasure.

I don’t know if our Vermont garden will end up being as big as the one we had in Indiana, but it will certainly be just as enjoyable. We’ve done more composting here in Vermont—it’s really big here. It’s amazing how composting can break down a lot of kitchen scraps and other material and turn an average piece of soil into a great base for a garden.

Another thing we’ve done is to change our gardening with regard to fertilizer and pesticides. There used to be a lot of nasty stuff that they’d put in the ground, but here in Vermont we’ve transitioned to use more organic material, like cow manure and other fertilizers. We’re trying as much as we can to avoid using harmful chemicals.

We carry this very same philosophy into our jobs at FiberMark. It’s Vermont, after all, and that’s what people do here. I find it very consistent with how we’re always seeking ways to reduce our waste here at the plant, and find new uses and re-uses for a lot of our waste material. It’s a way of living and working that I have enormous respect for.

Most people in Vermont and New England know that maple sugaring is one of our biggest local industries and that it’s a part of our heritage. Every late winter and early spring, the whole area is full of active sugar houses, with the steam from the boiling sap billowing out of rustic little shacks all across the region.

I live in the town of Vernon, Vermont, where my family and I have a small sugar house. We tap some small plots of sugarbush—both ours and our neighbors—and we just finished our eighth year of operation. We started out with buckets, but now we’ve gone to a network of tubing connecting tree to tree. It’s a small operation—we end up with about 55 gallons of syrup a season, which isn’t much, but when you understand how much raw sap it takes to boil down to 55 gallons of syrup, you’d be amazed!

More than anything, our sugaring is a social thing, enabling us to get together with friends and family and do something worthwhile.
As a sugar maker, I ran across a study on the Internet that was done by Cornell University. They used a 20-acre plot of ground in northern New Hampshire for this study, where the maple trees were dying for some reason. The bottom line is that when we burn fossil fuels of any kind we create carbon emissions—fallout, in a way. One of the outcomes is acid rain, which then leaches into the ground. This is having a pretty negative impact on maple trees and their growth.

The researchers took some soil samples from that plot and found that the levels of acidity were tremendously high. Another thing they found was that there was no undergrowth—no saplings—at the base of the bigger trees. So they took a gypsum-like product and spread it over the maples in that plot. They figured that within an 8-10-year period they should start to see a difference in the health of the trees. After just two years, though, they noticed a remarkable difference in the tree health and in the new growth that was starting to come up. What they had done was to begin to change the ph factor of the soil.

That ties back to why I’m proud to work here at FiberMark.  The company’s ongoing efforts to burn waste vegetable oil to run a lot of equipment in our plant have the potential to basically create a “net zero” effect on the carbon emissions out of the smokestack.  You can imagine what impact that has on the local environment and on the maple trees.  It’s a priority for me, and, I’m glad to say, for FiberMark, too.

Somebody asked me recently where I developed such a passion about protecting the environment.  It’s funny, but I’ve never really stopped to think about it; we all need to step up to the plate and do what we can to preserve the natural beauty of our surroundings.

I love the outdoors, and I love to ride motorcycles.  My husband, Ron, and I have two bikes—a little Honda 250 that we bought so my daughter and I could learn to drive on. The other is a Harley “Full Dresser”—a Road King.  It’s a big bike!  Ninety percent of the time, we’re on the Harley.  In fact, we’re out there every weekend when the weather’s agreeable.  I still don’t feel road worthy so I prefer being a passenger on the back of my husband’s bike, plus I get to sit back relax and sightsee.  And there’s a lot to see, not only in here in Vermont, but throughout New England—upstate and then into New Hampshire and all the way to the coast of Maine.  Even into Connecticut.  We mostly take back roads.  In Vermont, it’s often the old Route 5 that runs up north, and then onto Route 89 with all its twists and turns through the mountains.

Riding’s a family thing.  All our family members have their own bikes. And then there’s a whole network of our friends, and they all have bikes, too.  Sometimes there’s as many as seven or eight of us out there cruising on a weekend.   There’s nothing like it. We’ll do 300 miles in a single day.  Our nephew will track the weather on his phone and that will determine the course for the day.

I think my favorite rides are when we go to the coast.  There’s something about being at the ocean.   We’ll stop and walk the boardwalk enjoying the ocean breeze.  Then we’ll sit a bit and people-watch. It’s as simple as that. We do try to get back home before dark, but it doesn’t always happen.

But all of this brings me back to the environment.  The way I feel about it is that you take your values from home to your job.  We recycle at home—plastic bottles, newspapers and magazines and so on, and I do the same on the job.  I’m fortunate because my position at FiberMark is in purchasing, and that gives me the opportunity to make decisions about buying recycled fibers.  I shop for everything that would end up in a landfill that you can put back into our product, and that’s what I try to purchase.  I also buy what we call “pre-consumer” material, which is waste material generated by other manufacturing facilities. That might be box clippings, waste paper, and other things that we can process and put into our product.

It’s a conscious decision that I make on a daily basis.  And I believe everybody should take the initiative to try to reuse and recycle.  Not just for ourselves and our enjoyment, but for our grandkids and the generations beyond them.  I want to do what I can to keep that countryside clean and clear.

FiberMark is taking a great step in reusing recycled material.  It’s a big plus for the company, and one of the reasons I’m proud to work here.

I’m a native Vermonter and live in West Dummerston, Vermont, which isn’t too far up the road from the FiberMark plant.  It’s a neat place to be—the old hometown.

My brother called one night last fall and asked if I wanted to join him on a moose hunt the following weekend.  We headed up north to Burke Mountain and just had a wonderful time.  We didn’t shoot any moose, but that’s not really the reason we go up there anyway—it’s just an excuse to share some camaraderie and walk around in the woods a bit.

I had heard that, in the 1960s, they put a radar facility up on one of the peaks next to Burke Mountain.  It was during the Cold War era, and I think it was supposed to be a warning system to watch for aircraft that might be coming in from Canada.

The old station is on a long, saddle-backed mountain. I’d never been up there, so I was looking forward to doing a bit of exploring. We took a run up, and instantly I could see that it’s a whole different world and very remote.  The road is paved all the way, but it’s overgrown with brush and trees.  The wind was blowing and it was snowing a bit.  I’d guess it’s about 3,000 or 3,500 feet in elevation, and it’s so open that you can see clearly in all directions from up there.  So we were looking around at all the old, defunct buildings and equipment that were a part of this radar site, and I was impressed with how huge a facility it must have been.  At one point I noticed that there was an anemometer up there to gauge wind speed.  It seemed like it was still hooked up and working.

When we came back down, I saw a Vermont Electric Company truck on the road, so I stopped to talk to the driver.  I mentioned to him that the facility up there would make an awfully good site for a wind generation station.  The property is already compromised with the buildings and such, the wind blows all the time and they have this nice ridge to capture the wind from all directions.  He asked me if I’d noticed the anemometers and some of the other equipment that appeared to be working.  I said yes, I had, and he told me that they were already investigating it as a possible source for wind power.  Forget about the moose hunting.  To me, that was neatest and most interesting part of the trip!

It’s important because tapping wind power to create energy is a very good way of giving back to the grid something besides water power and nuclear power and everything else that they’re using to generate energy.  Before I said so long to the driver, I thanked him and his company for keeping the area open to curious souls like me.

I’ve been at FiberMark for more than 20 years and, when it comes to the environment, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the company’s thinking.  I like to think that I’m a part of the reason this company has become so environmentally conscious.  We try to trim waste and if we see something wrong we make sure to take care of it.  We’re all here for the same purpose, to make a living, but, in the meantime, if we can find or do something that makes a difference environmentally, then it’s our responsibility to see that it gets done.