SB: Global Greenwashers reformatted (was Re: SB: what is your plaster made from?)

["Scott Willing" <willing@mb.sympatico.ca>]

Below is an article on the "cement" manufacturing industry.  Not 
exactly on-topic, but not off-topic either.  I have been trying to 
locate the articles i found on fly ash containing dioxins and PAHs, 
but i haven't relocated them yet - still looking.  

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:  

o 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.)  

o Also in 1993, the Texas Air Control Board fined the Midlothian 
plant $135,000 after discovering emissions were about 50 percent 
higher than allowable.  

o 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.  

o In 1999, Iowa state officials found that the company failed to 
report excess emissions.  

o 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.  

o 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.  

 -- Katey Culver ecoville architechs www.ecoarchitech.net 
RecycleSource,Inc newtribe@directvinternet.com  

Let's live on this planet as if we intend to stay  


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