THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION · KALAMAZOO · A FIELD LEDGER

YOU ARE
DOWNSTREAM

The Allied Paper Superfund Ledger — Portage Creek and the Kalamazoo River

The mills made paper that copied without carbon. The copying required a molecule that does not die. This ledger records where the molecule went, what was paid, and what the water still carries. You are reading it from below the outfall. Everyone is.

OPEN THE LEDGER

Concept rendering. The mill is a composite; the river is not.

STRATUM 01 · SURFACE · the record, as filed

I. The Official Record

Between the 1950s and 1971, mills on Portage Creek and the Kalamazoo River de‑inked and recycled carbonless copy paper — NCR paper, the kind that duplicated a signature without a sheet of carbon between. The duplicating coating was made with polychlorinated biphenyls. De‑inking freed them.¹ The paper copied documents. The process copied harm, in a chemically persistent form, into the sediments of a river system that drains to Lake Michigan. What follows is the official account, entered as received. Read the margins.

LISTED

Added to the National Priorities List in 1990, in response to the nature and extent of PCB contamination.¹

a wound receives its file number

EXTENT

Roughly eighty miles of the Kalamazoo River, from Morrow Dam at Comstock to the mouth at Saugatuck, plus three miles of Portage Creek from Kalamazoo to the confluence.²

the site is a river. read that again.

SOURCE

PCBs released by the de‑inking and recycling of NCR carbonless copy paper, from the 1950s until 1971, when PCB use in the paper ended.¹ The molecule did not observe the discontinuation.

every copy cost a little of the coating. the coating cost the river.

DIVISION

The site is administered as six operable units: OU‑1, the Allied Paper property and Bryant Mill Pond; OU‑2, Willow Boulevard and A‑Site Landfill; OU‑3, King Highway Landfill; OU‑4, 12th Street Landfill; OU‑5, Portage Creek and Kalamazoo River sediments; OU‑7, the Plainwell Mill.¹

count the numerals.

REMOVED

Nearly 470,000 cubic yards of contaminated material taken out; about twelve miles of river and bank cleaned and restored; 82 acres of contaminated material capped.¹

removed is a past tense. remaining is not.

REMAINING

At the Allied Paper Landfill alone, an estimated 1.6 million cubic yards of contaminated waste, being consolidated and capped in place under the Record of Decision of September 21, 2016.³ Public comment pressed for full removal; containment was selected.

removed: 470,000. remaining, one parcel: 1,600,000.

SETTLED

Millennium Holdings, the corporate vessel left holding the Allied liabilities, dissolved in the Lyondell bankruptcy; the estate settled for roughly ten cents on each dollar of the estimated cleanup, about $103 million to EPA.⁴ NCR entered a $245 million consent decree in 2020.⁵ A 2018 judgment split past costs among four paper companies, 40/40/15/5; in 2022 the Sixth Circuit found the claims against two of them barred by the statute of limitations.⁶

the clock is also infrastructure.

ADVISORY

Do Not Eat — all fish species, Kalamazoo River from Morrow Dam to the Allegan Dam. Do Not Eat — fish from Portage Creek. Cause: PCBs.⁷ The advisories are maintained annually. They are, in the official phrase, an institutional control.

the fish did not sign.

An excavator mounted on a barge dredges river sediment inside a long orange containment boom, green trees on both banks. — Removal in practice: excavator on barge, containment boom deployed, Kalamazoo River watershed. The orange line is the working boundary between *contained* and *downstream*. Photograph from the project archive.

STRATUM 02 · GROUND · the wound, in place

II. The Excavation

The site is not a point on a map; it is the map. Below, the river runs west — Morrow Dam on the right, Lake Michigan on the left, Portage Creek arriving from the south through the city. Each stain is an operable unit. Open them. Then raise the water and watch what contained does under load.

baseline flow — the caps hold; monitoring continues.

DISTURBANCE / FLOOD FREQUENCY

With scripts off, the instrument stands down; the record stands. The six operable units are OU‑1 Allied Paper property/Bryant Mill Pond, OU‑2 Willow Boulevard & A‑Site Landfill, OU‑3 King Highway Landfill, OU‑4 12th Street Landfill, OU‑5 Portage Creek & Kalamazoo River sediments, OU‑7 Plainwell Mill.

select a stain to open its file

STRATUM 03 · BODY · the copy enters flesh

III. Body Burden

PCBs are lipophilic: they prefer fat to water. So the river files them in living tissue — algae, then insect, then minnow, then carp, then whatever eats the carp — each step up the chain a concentration, an interest payment. The fish are the river’s memory in edible form. The State of Michigan publishes, every year, a guide to how much of that memory a body can safely absorb.⁷

THE FISH THAT REMEMBER — advisory explorer

REACH SPECIES

choose a reach and a species

DOWNSTREAM RECEIPT — a rhetorical estimator

Three sliders, one receipt. This instrument computes nothing about your body; it computes your position in the ledger. The disclaimer at the bottom is the most factual line on it.

MEALS OF LOCALLY CAUGHT FISH, PER YEAR 0 YEARS LIVED NEAR THE RIVER OR ITS FLOODPLAIN 0 GENERATIONS OF FAMILY IN THE PAPER TRADE 0

STRATUM 04 · LANGUAGE · the containment of meaning

IV. The Language of Containment

A cleanup this size runs on paper — fitting, for a paper town. The paper runs on terms of art, and the terms of art do double duty: each one describes a procedure and performs a reassurance. The fronts of these cards carry the official senses, paraphrased from the record. The reverse faces are editorial — this project’s unhoused glosses, what the term says when it is not at work. Flip them.

THE TRANSLATOR

Paste a phrase of remedial prose. Indexed terms will be unhoused.

STRATUM 05 · TESTIMONY · the oracle of the wound

V. Testimony

Depositions were taken. Not all of the deponents are persons; none of them are quotations. The two human voices are composites, invented for this ledger — no real person is quoted or portrayed. The others are readings of the record, given voice. That is what an oracle has always been: the file, speaking.

call a deponent

STRATUM 06 · INHERITANCE · what remains, and to whom

VI. Inheritance

Decisions leak forward. A coating formulated in 1954 becomes a line in a 2025 fishing guide; a bankruptcy docketed in 2009 becomes the funding condition of a cap poured in 2024. The timeline below is drawn with its echoes attached — select an entry and see where it lands. Entries marked projection are exactly that.

THE LOCKED FINDING — a palimpsest

The remedy is protective of human health and the environment in the short term. Long‑term protectiveness requires the continued operation and maintenance of engineered controls and the enforcement of institutional controls, to be verified at intervals of five years, for as long as contamination remains in place.

for as long as contamination remains in place — that is: there is no last five-year review on the schedule. maintenance is the remedy. the remedy is a subscription.

The contamination is not on this land; it is a stratum of it. The Superfund is not an erasure but a newer myth laid over an older one — the devouring mill, then the managing agency — and both are load‑bearing now. The debt was never denominated in a currency the river accepts, so the payments continue in the only coin available: attention, in perpetuity. Meaning is produced. So is its sediment. You are downstream. Everyone is.

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