Page: 6 of 8 View All
Green Club an EPA charade
The EPA touts the perk-filled program, but has recruited some firms with dismal environmental records.
"It all sounds good . . . but you can't give away the store to get that done," she said. "Imagine if we went to a landfill and they said, 'We're in Performance Track,' and we said we wouldn't inspect them. There is kind of a disconnect here. That's the problem."
But Sharon Baxter, who runs Virginia's Environmental Excellence Program, which complements Performance Track, thinks it works well.
"Having that plaque on the wall is a huge motivator for management," Baxter said.
The case of DuPont
One quality that Performance Track demonstrates consistently is loyalty to its members.
Even after companies are accused of violating environmental rules and pay huge fines, Performance Track is reluctant to kick them out.
Consider what happened when the program discovered that a member facility in Newark, Del., was under investigation for allegedly keeping important health information from the public.
The Performance Track member was DuPont's Stine Haskell Research Center, which had been lauded by the EPA in 2004 and 2005 for, among other things, recycling mercury from the lab's lightbulbs.
During those same years, EPA's enforcement arm was pursuing the lab for withholding information about a likely carcinogen - perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA - used to make Teflon and other nonstick plastics.
DuPont began studying PFOA in the 1960s and by the 1980s suspected it was toxic to humans, according to the EPA.
In 1984 the company realized that the chemical was turning up in the drinking water of nearly 50,000 people living near its Washington Works in West Virginia. By 1991, DuPont discovered that PFOA levels in the water there surpassed its own safety guidelines. The chemical was also accumulating in the bodies of DuPont workers.
Today, PFOA is found in the blood of almost all Americans, though no one is sure how it gets there, or how much is harmful.
In 1997, the EPA asked the chemical giant for information on PFOA. The company did not provide any, though the Toxic Substances Control Act required it to do so.
Joe Kiger, an elementary school teacher who lives in Parkersburg, W. Va., said he received a letter in 2000 from his local water district explaining that there was PFOA in the water, but at a safe level.
That made Kiger wonder.
"What's this chemical?" Kiger recalled thinking. "What's it doing in my water?"
He says he called the EPA in Philadelphia and was advised to get an attorney.
The following year, he sued DuPont, along with a group of citizens. They later uncovered documents showing the company had been concerned about PFOA since 1981.
In July 2004, the EPA announced a formal enforcement action against DuPont, alleging the lab withheld information about the substantial risk of injury to human health or the environment.
A year later, DuPont paid a $10.25 million fine, the largest civil penalty in EPA history at the time, and agreed to spend $6.25 million on environmental projects. The company also paid a $107 million settlement to residents in West Virginia and Ohio for polluting their drinking water.
