Doe Run Peru: The truth will out

Reuters knocks one straight out the park. Here's the link and below is the story.

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Doe Run Peru faces renewed environmental criticism

Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:43pm EDT

LIMA, March 26 (Reuters) - With Doe Run Peru nearly shuttered amid sliding metals prices and tight credit, a Peruvian environmental group has released a new study saying the company dragged its feet on cleaning up the town around its smelter in La Oroya.

The company halted 95 percent of work this week at its sprawling plant after banks cut its credit lines, strangling its ability to buy concentrates.

The government is weighing whether to give Doe Run a $75 million bailout to save thousands of jobs. The government is also mulling whether to grant it an extension to meet terms of an environmental cleanup plan for La Oroya, long ranked as one of the world's most polluted cities.

"It's dirtier now than it was before," said Corey Laplante, a U.S. Fulbright scholar at the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law who led the study.

"If the government is going to give this bailout, it needs to attach a number of conditions: more transparent financial reporting, stronger public-participation mechanisms and stricter air-quality standards," he told Reuters.

Doe Run says it has been lowering emissions of polluting metals since it bought the smelter in 1997 from an old state-run company.

But Laplante says official data shows pollution has risen over a longer time frame, going back to 1995.

Using information from the Sindicato station that monitors lead in the air, Doe Run has said pollution fell 77 percent between 1997 and 2008.

Laplante says using 1997 as a baseline is misleading because pollution spiked that year, making pollution in subsequent years look low. When 1995 is used as the baseline, pollution at the station actually rose 6 percent through 2008, he said.

Victor Andres Belaunde, a Doe Run official, said data collected before 1997 may not be reliable, and the company cannot use data collected before it owned the smelter in its environmental compliance program.

When Doe Run bought the smelter -- which produces copper, zinc, lead and precious metals -- it was told it would need to spend little a more than $100 million to bring La Oroya into environmental compliance and solve a public health problem.

So far, Doe Run says it has spent $307 million, and that the total cost will end up being $500 million.

The compliance program still has not been completed. Initially, it was expected to take 10 years, but in 2006, the company got a three-year extension and now the government is being asked to grant another one.

Doe Run says the clean up job has turned out to be bigger than it thought.

Critics say it is stalling and that the company's owner, New York billionaire Ira Rennert of the Renco Group, has the money to accelerate the clean up.

But Peru has prohibited Rennert from taking profits out of Doe Run until the environmental program is complete. Now that work has halted at the plant, the future of a cleanup that was being financed by cashflows hangs in the balance.

Unmissable information on Doe Run Peru

Chernobyl, anyone? This bizarre mashup photo is
actually part of DRPs promo propaganda

US citizen and Fulbright Scholar Corey Laplante has been living in Peru and studying the operations at Doe Run Peru (DRP) for around eight months. He has a blog (that I recently discovered) and last night posted this article about the operational situation at DRP.

Thus the scales fall from mine eyes. All this time I fell for the DRP line. I was wrong.

This is seriously, seriously unmissable reading. Laplante shoots down in flames the company propaganda about how the place is cleaner than before. Also, this guy is not speaking from some treehugging NGO save the planet prejudiced playbook about DRP, but has done some very solid research work on the company. What he has found has made him angry. Damn I'm angry, too.

You should be angry too, when a shit like Ira Rennert takes over a company, significantly increases poisonous pollution outputs, then uses his first year at the site for his own benchmark thus later falsely claiming reductions in pollution. Here's an excerpt from Corey's post, but I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing. Here's the link to Corey's post again, just to make sure you go.

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3) You site “dramatic reductions” in contamination levels. Over the last few years Doe Run has reduced contamination. In fact, according to a graph that they sent CNN for December’s planet in Peril piece, they have reduced lead contamination by 77%. Wow. Seems impressive right? Trust me I know—I was fooled too (see some of my earlier posts)

When we look a little more closely however, we see what is really going on here. The graph that Doe Run sent to CNN compares 2008 against 1997. That is to say, they are pointing out that lead contamination is 77% lower in 2008 than it was in 1997. I confirmed the numbers with the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the reduction does, in fact amount to 77%

BUT, 1997 is the year that Doe Run came to La Oroya and dramatically increased contamination levels. They have only reduced contamination relative to when they increased it before.

If we really want to measure the changes in La Oroya—absolute changes—we need to look at the situation as it was before Doe Run came to town. Luckily, I was able to get my hands on this information. Specifically, I have the information for the same monitoring station that DRP used to derive the 77% figure—Sindicato. And when I compared 2008 against 1995 (instead of using 1997 as the baseline), I found that lead contamination at the Sindicato monitoring station did not decrease by 77%. In fact it increased by 6%.

At another monitoring station, Hotel Inca, lead contamination increased by 255%. That is not a typo. 255%.

Continues here

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Once again, I am in debt to reader MH. Thank you. There will be more on Doe Run and the (looking like it's about to happen) government bailout soon. Watch this space.