In Stopping Canadian Wood Pellet Imports, Drax Appears to Admit Unsustainable Practices

Drax’s United Kingdom power station, the world’s largest wood burner (and the U.K.’s number one polluter), will no longer source any wood from Canada. The announcement comes after years of sustained pressure from decision-makers, NGOs, journalists, and others over Drax’s logging practices in Canada. 

But this isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for Drax. Far from it. The wood that the company imports and burns from other countries—mainly the United States—is just as problematic. Drax must concede that if burning wood from Canada isn’t an option, then the case for burning wood from anywhere else doesn’t stack up either.

Journalists and environmental groups have spent years investigating Drax’s logging practices in Canada. Two BBC Panorama investigations and reports by Stand.earth and Conservation North independently confirmed that Drax imports and burns wood from Canada’s primary, old-growth, and ancient forests, including the boreal, which is one of the world’s last remaining intact forests, with trees that are up to 250 years old. 

Drax has repeatedly denied this in public, of course, even after an investigation by the U.K. government. But evidence continues to emerge showing Drax knows exactly what it’s doing.

While Drax claims its decision to stop wood pellet imports from Canada is due to tariffs, it’s hard to see this as anything other than an admission of guilt that its logging practices just don’t make the cut. Drax plans to keep logging in Canada and shipping the wood to other countries, like Japan. But if Drax doesn’t think it can get away with selling Canadian wood pellets to the U.K., why does it think it can get away with selling it elsewhere?

Further, Drax’s decision to stop importing wood pellets from Canada to the U.K. will only put more pressure on the U.S. Southeast, where Drax has always sourced the majority of its wood pellets. Drax’s logging practices in the Southeast are almost identical to those in Canada—clearcutting mature, whole trees in an ecologically sensitive area—and they are the two global biodiversity hot spots in North America. 

Plus, Drax’s pellet mills, which are typically located in environmental justice communities, emit scores of dangerous and toxic air pollutants that are linked to asthma, cancer, and other conditions. Drax has been fined for repeatedly breaking air pollution laws, exacerbating these harms to communities. All of this means that Drax shouldn’t be logging in the U.S. Southeast for biomass either—and the U.K. shouldn't be allowing imports from there.

Burning wood pellets at Drax worsens climate change, harms forests and wildlife, and endangers people’s health. It doesn’t matter where the wood comes from. Drax’s plan to stop burning wood from Canada is a red herring intended to distract us from its similarly horrible practices the world over. 

The U.K. government recently had the chance to fix many of these problems when it consulted on new sustainability rules for biomass. It could have ruled out burning forest bioenergy altogether or prohibited imports from countries where biomass logging practices have proven particularly harmful. Instead, it proposed new rules that won’t fix anything and awarded brand-new low-carbon contracts—worth billions—to the Drax and Lynemouth biomass power stations. 

It’s time for the U.K. government to cancel Drax’s and Lynemouth’s new contracts and phase out biomass altogether. It’s not OK in Canada, and it’s not OK anywhere else.