ASARCO

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ASARCO, Inc. is a major producer of copper and other metals. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, it is a subsidiary of Grupo México, a Mexican mining and railroad company.

ASARCO's products include copper, bismuth, bismuth selenide, antimony, arsenic, arsenic selenide, cadmium sulfide, cadmium telluride, copper selenide, lead, lead telluride, selenium, sulfur, tellurium, zinc, litharge, test lead, bismuth oxide, silver, and gold.

Founded in 1899 as the American Smelting and Refining Company, it officially changed its name to ASARCO Incorporated in 1975. Meyer Guggenheim and his sons took over the company in 1901. In 1916, 17 ASARCO employees were killed and mutilated by Pancho Villa's men, one of the incidents that sparked the US Military's Punitive Expedition against Villa.

A hundred years after its founding, in 1999, it was bought by Grupo México, which itself began as ASARCO's 49%-owned Mexican subsidiary in 1965.

On August 17, 2005, ASARCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Corpus Christi, Texas under then-president Daniel Tellechea.

[edit] Pollution and Environmental Issues

ASARCO's name is attached to 19 Superfund sites around the U.S. They are:

The Interstate Lead Company facility in Alabama;
Vasquez Boulevard and I-70 in Colorado;
Lowry Landfill in Colorado;
California Gultch mine and river systems in Colorado;
Summitville Mine in Colorado;
Globe Plant in Colorado;
Bunker Hill Mining in the Coeur d'Alene River Basin in Idaho;
Circle Smelting Corporation in Illinois;
NL Industries/Taracorp lead smelter in Illinois;
Cherokee County lead and zinc mine and surrounding area in Kansas;
Oronogo-Duenweg mining belt in Missouri;
East Helena smelter and surrounding residences in Montana;
Kin-Buc Landfill in New Jersey;
Tar Creek (Ottawa County) iron and zinc operations and surrounding residences in Oklahoma;
Tonolli Corporation smelter in Pennsylvania;
Ross Metals smelter and surface water in Tennessee;
Murray smelter in Utah;
Richardson Flat tailings in Utah;
Commencement Bay, Near Shore/Tide Flats smelter, groundwater, and residences in Tacoma and Ruston, Washington.

The first environmental lawsuit was brought against Asarco in 1910 by a group of farmers in Solano County, California for the sulfur dioxide emissions from the company's San Francisco Bay smelter. The court granted an injunction that shut down the smelter, and the decision was upheld by the California Supreme Court. One of Asarco's lawyers then got a committee appointed, which included a company-appointed chemist, which led to a settlement that limited the smelter's release of sulfur dioxide to 30 tons per day. The settlement did not address lead, and scores of horses died of chronic lead exposure in the area in the following decades.

United States v. Asarco rulings have been unfavorable to the company in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

In the 1970s, the Centers for Disease Control found that the Asarco smelter in El Paso, Texas was responsible for abnormally high lead levels in children who lived nearby. The city won a lawsuit against the company and, although denying guilt, Asarco agreed to strict monitoring for lead, zinc, cadmium, and arsenic releases as well as to provide medical exams and blood therapy to children with lead poisoning.

In 1995 ASARCO submitted a demolition and site cleanup plan to the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality for their impact on downtown Omaha, Nebraska and a local residential area. Fined $3.6 million in 1996 for discharging lead and other pollutants into the Missouri River. Omaha's ASARCO plant was closed in July, 1997.^[1] After extensive site cleanup, the land was turned over to the City of Omaha as a 23-acre park. All of North Omaha, comprising more than 8,000 acres, was declared a Superfund site, and as of 2003, 290 acres had been cleaned.^[2]

In 2003, Asarco and the Environmental Protection Agency set up a trust fund of $100 million to help pay for the company's environmental clean-up costs. Actual estimated costs for clean-up were between $500 million and $1 billion, as of 2006.

One stated reason for declaring bankruptcy was the number of pending lawsuits (Daniel Tellechea identified "numerous environmental-related lawsuits brought by governmental authorities and private parties"). Asarco had more than 100 civil environmental cases pending against it when it filed for bankruptcy. Prior to the bankruptcy, Asarco transferred much of its assets to a shell company set up by Grupo México. A few months after Asarco's bankruptcy, Grupo México announced that net profits had doubled, in large part because of the removal of Asarco's environmental liabilities.