St. Regis Paper Company 
Cass Lake, Cass County, Minnesota

The St. Regis Paper Company Superfund Site is a former wood preserving facility that operated from 1957 to 1985. Groundwater, surface water, sediment and soil on and nearby the site are contaminated as a result of the wood preserving process and waste disposal activities. The site consists of 125 acres on the Leech Lake Reservation, within the Chippewa National Forest, in the City of Cass Lake.

Most of the site contamination is the result of pressure treatment of wood with pentachlorophenol. Workers and some neighbors appear to have been exposed to toxic levels of pentachlorophenol when the plant was operating. Of most current concern, however, is environmental contamination with dioxins and furans ("dioxin”), which were impurities in the pentachlorophenol pesticide. Current activities at the site stem from reviews of response actions taken in the mid-1980's that were found to be inadequate for protection of human health and the environment.

The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, the Minnesota Department of Health, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry have completed a series of reports that focus on health impacts associated with environmental exposures to contamination from the St. Regis Superfund site. Each report addresses a specific environmental medium (soil, sediment, water, and fish) or community health concerns. The reports completed to date are available from the links below.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has information available about this site on their webpage Superfund Site: St. Regis Paper Co., Cass Lake, MN