but, wht stifle free enterprise? businesses need a freer hand!! the market will take care of us!!

[Guest guest]

Global Greenwashers

 

By Lucy Komisar, Pacific News Service

August 26, 2002

 

Along with environmentalists and community activists, big business has descended

upon Johannesburg, South Africa, to tout its own " green " growth strategies in

the summit on Earth-friendly development. But if the environmental record of one

key corporate player is any indication, the overtures are pure " greenwash. "

 

 

Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss, has fought environmental regulation of business

since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when he founded the Business

Council for Sustainable Development, a coalition of 160 international companies

including AOL Time Warner, AT & T, Bayer, BP, Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical.

 

 

The council, attending this week's World Summit on Sustainable Development in

Johannesburg, insists on voluntary self-regulation, a strategy supported by the

Bush administration.

 

 

But the Schmidheiny family-controlled international cement conglomerate Holcim

has done more than fail at self-regulation. Even while its U.S. plants have been

fined repeatedly for environmental violations, it has worked to weaken

restrictions on cement production emissions internationally.

 

 

Holcim (formerly Holderbank Financiere Glaris Ltd., based in Switzerland) owns

15 U.S. cement factories that do $1.2 billion in business per year. In August,

Holcim's Midlothian, TX, plant was fined $223,125 by state regulators for

violating limits on pollution, including toxic carbon monoxide, lung-damaging

soot and smog-causing compounds.

 

 

A 1993 Environmental Protection Agency study reported that people living near

cement plants may inhale harmful airborne dioxins, arsenic, cadmium, chromium,

thallium, and lead at levels that might cause cancer or other diseases. Such

emissions are especially dangerous to children, the elderly and people with

heart and lung conditions.

 

 

Holcim had promised in 1997 that despite the expansion of the Texas plant, new

technology would result in cleaner air. It was granted permits to double

production.

 

 

But emissions went up, not down. Residents near the plant reported a high

incidence of cancer as well as illnesses among farm animals. The pollution

affected the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth region.

 

 

Local regulators said the plant had not installed equipment promised in the

permit application, made changes that increased air pollution, and then lied in

emissions reports for nine years.

 

 

They called Holcim a " high priority violator/significant non-complier. "

 

 

Now, St. Lawrence Cement, a Canadian company controlled by Holcim, is seeking

permission to build what may be the largest cement factory in the United States

on the Hudson River in New York. Environmentalists say the plant's 404-foot

stack would discharge respiratory disease-causing soot over a large part of the

Hudson Valley.

 

 

The Schmidheiny family's concrete factories have a long history of environmental

violations:

 

 

• In 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fined the Holnam Holly

Hill Plant in South Carolina $838,850 for failing to comply with air emission

standards. (Holcim's U.S. operation formerly was called Holnam, for Holderbank

North America.)

 

 

• Also in 1993, the Texas Air Control Board fined the Midlothian plant

$135,000 after discovering emissions were about 50 percent higher than

allowable.

 

 

• In 1994, the company's Clarksville, Missouri, plant, which began burning

hazardous waste in 1986, paid a $100,874 fine for violations ranging from

failing to analyze waste to keeping waste in open containers.

 

 

• In 1999, Iowa state officials found that the company failed to report excess

emissions.

 

 

• Also in 1999, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality fined the

Holnam plant in Dundee $576,500 for emissions 7.5 times the allowable limits.

 

 

• In 2000, the company was fined because a coal mill and dryer stack at its

LaPorte, Colorado, plant was releasing twice as much pollution as permitted. Its

Florence plant had failed air-pollution tests three times since 1996.

 

 

Holcim spokesman Tom Chizmadia the violations were not " willful " and that the

company's " intent is to comply with all standards. " Asked about the violations

on record, Chizmadia said, " limits are set with an intention of protecting

environment and health, and those limits are set very low. "

 

 

Cement production air pollution became more dangerous after the EPA banned

certain hazardous waste from landfills in 1985 and allowed it to be burned in

cement kilns. Marti Sinclair, co-chair of environmental quality strategy for the

Sierra Club, said that to avoid problems in cities with political influence and

access to the media, Congress set a low population limit on places where waste

could be burned. " Holnam went to the Deep South and started burning hazardous

waste in Black communities in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, " she

said.

 

 

Environmentalists say that the burning process releases into the air deadly

dioxins and PCBs, carcinogenic chemicals that may cause birth defects, including

mental and physical retardation.

 

 

The Business Council for Sustainable Development has picked the Johannesburg

summit to argue its self-regulation position in a new book, " Walking the Talk, "

by Schmidheiny, Charles O. Holliday Jr., CEO of DuPont, and Philip Watts,

chairman of the Royal Dutch Shell Group. Set for launching at the summit, the

book maintains that multinationals have kept the commitments made in Rio.

 

 

Lucy Komisar is a freelance investigative reporter based in New York City.