Greenwashing is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that a company's policies or products are environmentally friendly.
Slabwatchdog.com is the curiously opaque website masquerading as an environmental group. It has been identified as a potential frontgroup for the lead battery industry.
Following the Money revealed the connections between the Slabwatchdog and two of the biggest players in the lead battery industry:the RSR corporation and the Doe Run Company.
Now in the first part of this diary I examined the environmental history of RSR Corporation and discovered how Slabwatchdog is fronting for them by providing a "green" patina to cover their operations in this notoriously toxic industry. In part 2, I will review the environmental history of Doe Run. The findings after the jump.
The Doe Run Company is one of the largest lead producers in the world. It also has a well-documented and decades old history as a bad environmental actor in Missouri and Peru
Here is just a sample of how they have operated over the last several decades.
They have poisoned their own workers and then denied them required medical leave. In February 1988, Doe Run was fined $2.78 million for OSHA violations including exposing workers to high levels of lead and then dismissing them to sidestep Government medical leave requirements.
Doe Run’s haphazard trucking practices spread contaminated lead dust on public roads throughout the community. In September 2001 the Missouri Department of Natural Resources issued an order to Cease and Desist to Doe Run.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources (department) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA have recently learned of very high levels of lead contamination along public streets in Herculaneum that Doe Run uses as haul roads. Lead contamination along these roads, in yards and playgrounds, and in ambient air has prompted the Missouri Department of Health to conclude the situation poses a clear and present danger and an imminent and substantial endangerment to the citizens of Herculaneum, especially young children and pregnant women. As a result the department is ordering the Doe Run Company to immediately abate all violations and cease and desist the activities causing or contributing to the contamination along the streets of Herculaneum.
The contamination of Herculaneum also came from Doe Run’s smelting operations. In April 2002, Doe Run agrees to pay a
$1,000,000 civil fine and Federal and State agencies signed an agreement listing mandatory actions to be taken by the company including the buy-out of 160 contaminated homes in Herculaneum.
Recently Doe Run agreed to spend approximately $65 million to correct violations of environmental laws at ten of its lead mining, milling and smelting facilities in Missouri. The 10.08.2010 settlement also requires the company to pay a $7 million civil penalty.
One of the most polluted places on earth.
Doe Run purchased the smelting operation in La Oroya, Peru in 1997. Since 1922, adults and children in this mining town in the Peruvian Andes have been exposed to the toxic emissions and wastes from the plant which has been largely responsible for the dangerously high lead levels found in children's blood. Surveys conducted by the Peruvian Ministry of Health in 1999 revealed blood lead levels among local children to be dangerously high, triple the World Health Organization limit. Neurologists at local hospitals state that even newborn children have high blood lead levels, inherited while still in the womb.
Although Doe Run did not start the contamination in La Oroya, the company has certainly contributed to the problem that it inherited. Today, the Doe Run smelter emits about 1,000 tons of toxic pollution into the community daily. The company has largely delayed major actions that would clean up and/or significantly lessen the pollution, and the Peruvian national government has been more than lenient with the corporation. One of the most odious instances of this negligence came after Doe Run's attempt to postpone their environmental responsibilities "due to financial hardship," even though the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission showed that the company sent $$130 million in "commissions and consulting fees" back to its headquarters in St. Louis.
Non-profit advocates have documented that under Doe Run Management, pollution at La Oroya has gotten worse. Through a careful review of the emission data sent by Doe Run to the Energy and Mining Ministry, has shown that the pollution has increased; for example, the sulfur dioxide has climbed to near a 300% due to production increases and that heavy metal gas concentrations have increased in the air: Lead, 1,160%, Cadmium, 1,990%, and Arsenic, 606%.
It seems that Slabwatchdog.com is providing green credentials and cover for RSR and Doe Run, two toxic corporations responsible for some of the most polluted locations in North And South America. Perhaps instead of talking a good game about industry best practices, protecting the environment, and workers health they should review that noted physician Hippocrates who when writing on Epidemics said:
The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.