This is no time to start backsliding on the Pigeon River | Sam Venable The Knoxville News-Sentinel 3/9/2021 Sam Venable, The Knoxville News Sentinel Like the proverbial bad penny, Pigeon River pollution keeps turning up. Or, in this case, bubbling up. The state of North Carolina wants to loosen regulations, including removal of a color variance, on effluent entering the Pigeon River from the Blue Ridge Paper Products plant in Canton, N.C. If you’re confused by the Blue Ridge name and its eco-sounding nom de plume, Evergreen Packaging, let me lay two words on you. Champion Paper. Yep, this is the same mill that sent dark, foul-smelling, foamy wastewater into the Pigeon for much of the 20th century. Thanks to decades of hell-raising from East Tennesseans who were (and still are) on the receiving end of this filth, federal regulators ordered the plant to clean up its act in the mid-1980s.