Longtime communities founded by the timber industry have had a steady decline for the last few decades due to closures of paper mills, uncertain wood markets, and ever changing international influences. In spite of the abundance of natural renewable resources, these communities continue to be faced with high unemployment and underutilized industrial-zoned infrastructure. Rural America needs help.
Fortunately, SynSel has solutions to help these communities. It deploys a decentralized model that places its biorefineries close to the source of wood feedstock and targets towns with an available workforce and established industrial infrastructure. It then leverages existing transportation infrastructure to efficiently move the fuel to those markets with the highest incentives for sale on the commodity markets.
A community’s economic benefits from a SynSel biorefinery are tremendous:
Hundreds of construction jobs to build the biorefinery
Nearly 100 full-time, good paying jobs to operate the biorefinery
Revival of the timber trade through new harvesting and transportation
Strong tax base from the biorefinery
Additional manufacturing and services jobs to support increased economic opportunity within each community
Finally, SynSel represents an opportunity for the individual and institutional Impact Investor. The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment states that ESG-focused (Environment Social Governance) US assets under management have grown from $3.7 trillion in 2012 to $8.7 trillion in 2016 – an annual increase of 34%. Nuveen, a leading institutional Sustainable Investor fund states “Experience tells us that federal policy has, at most, an indirect or even marginal impact on investors’ desire to incorporate ESG factors into their financial decision making. Instead, growth in RI (Responsible Investing) has always been led by investor demand.
As one of the fastest-growing areas in asset management, RI has proven its viability through increasing investor interest, competitive performance and—with one of every five investment dollars associated with an RI strategy—its undeniable scale. The shift in tone from Washington is unlikely to change this.”
