Schnitzer Steel, which has taken on ambitious scrapping projects across the country, also has an atrocious history of polluting the very communities it operates in.
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.
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