Steel company with history of environmental violations faces more penalties for pollution

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The Justice Department announced on Friday that it had reached a proposed settlement with Schnitzer Steel Inc., a manufacturing and scrap metal recycling company with a history of environmental violations. Under the settlement, Schnitzer must “pay a civil penalty of $1,550,000, implement compliance measures worth over $1,700,000 to prevent the release of ozone-depleting refrigerants and non-exempt substitutes from refrigerant-containing items during their processing and disposal and complete an environmental mitigation project.” For a company that is one of Oregon’s richest, with revenues of $846 million in Q4 of 2021 alone, this isn’t exactly asking a lot—especially since this isn’t the first time that Schnitzer has incurred a penalty for its practices.

This time, the Justice Department focused on the alleged Clean Air Act violations Schnitzer Steel had incurred at 40 of its facilities in Alabama, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, and Puerto Rico. According to a complaint, the company failed to adequately recover refrigerants from small appliances and motor vehicle air conditioners. The EPA has stringent guidelines for safe refrigerant disposal, as refrigerants can contribute significantly to ozone layer depletion and greenhouse gas emissions. According to a fact sheet from the California Air Resource Board, just one pound of the most common refrigerant used, R-22, “is nearly as potent as a ton of carbon dioxide.” The refrigerant listed in the Justice Department’s press release, R-12, is even worse: It contains chlorofluorocarbons that further deplete the ozone layer and has more than 10,000 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

The Justice Department released a consent decree that Schnitzer must follow if it agrees to the settlement. Laid out in 39 pages, the document allows Schnitzer to not admit to any liability, though it does force the company to clean up its act by taking steps to properly recover and dispose of refrigerants by properly training employees and ensuring that the necessary signed documents needed to verify refrigerant disposal aren’t falsified—the latter of which the Justice Department absolutely accused Schnitzer of accepting in its complaint. Key information on paperwork at some facilities appeared to be missing when inspectors were able to investigate Schnitzer, and, in some cases, those facilities didn’t even have any protocol in place for refrigerant disposal in the first place. It’s worth noting that many of the facilities listed in the DOJ complaint are in areas with high poverty rates that exceed the national average. Some of these facilities have more problems than just how Schnitzer handles its refrigerant disposal, too.

A complaint filed last month revealed that one of the facilities listed in the DOJ complaint was part of a handful of Schnitzer facilities the company has been sued over due to its “dangerous” disposal of heavy metals that have harmed the Merrimack River, according to a complaint filed by the Conservation Law Foundation. According to Violation Tracker, Schnitzer has had to pay more than $5 million in penalties for more than a dozen environmental complaints, including its many high-profile settlements. One 2021 settlement in Oakland over its pumping toxic emissions into the West Oakland neighborhood cost the company $4.1 million. So egregious were Schnitzer’s Bay Area violations that there’s even a Schnitzer Tracker website that was set up to monitor its battle with the Oakland A’s, who sued the company over the handling of its massive amounts of toxic waste. A DOJ settlement isn’t the most encouraging development if this is that status quo for Schnitzer, but it’s at least a step towards accountability in a sector that badly needs it.