For Nicole Rycroft, the first modern, tree-free commercial-scale pulp mill in North America was a “lightbulb moment” about the climate crisis.
The new mill in eastern Washington state, called Columbia Pulp, runs entirely without woodchips.
Instead, it makes pulp, for paper products like tissues and food containers, out of some of the hundreds of millions of tonnes of wheat straw that is left over after farmers harvest their grain.
