A Pennsylvania building materials manufacturer that ran a now demolished PVC plant in the Lake Charles area has agreed to pay $525,000 in fines over chronically high air emissions of a human carcinogen and other alleged violations in the last years before the facility closed in January 2019.
But state regulators also decided that they would not fine the company additionally for an April 2020 fire that released toxic vinyl chloride from residual chemicals in a tank while the complex was being torn down. Agency inspectors had initially raised concerns?— later shown to be unprovable?— that undocumented hazardous waste may have been part of the blaze, regulatory papers show.
The proposed fine against CertainTeed Corporation is the largest offered so far by the state Department of Environmental Quality since the Landry administration took over promising a more pro-business approach. The proposed fine against CertainTeed would have been the third-largest settlement fine in the last year of former Gov. John Bel Edwards' term.
In March 2019, DEQ officials under Edwards accused CertainTeed's Westlake polyvinyl chloride resin plant of exceeding permit limits for vinyl chloride monomer, or VCM, air emissions for most days of the year between 2015 and 2018.?
The plant was in the Westlake area amid the large Westlake Chemical Co. operation, between the junction of Interstates 10 and 210 and Bayou Verdine and the Calcasieu River.
In a subsequent report in 2021, DEQ officials dropped the allegations from 2015, but, for the three following years, still accused CertainTeed of exceedances in vinyl chloride monomer for around 56 percent to more than 80 percent of the days — between 205 and 303 days annually, depending on the year.
Used in plastics production as a precursor chemical for making polyvinyl chloride, vinyl chloride monomer, or simply vinyl chloride, is a known human carcinogen. It has caused liver, brain and lung cancer in workers with long-term exposure and is known to cause genetic damage to human cells, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says.
Short-term exposure can cause dizziness, nausea and eye and skin irritation.
A highly flammable and colorless gas, vinyl chloride was the potent chemical involved in the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, fire and leak in February 2023.
In July, the?Biden administration?announced vinyl chloride would be one of five common chemicals to undergo a new review of their toxicity. The chemical?is the basic material of polyvinyl chloride home plumbing, vinyl siding and other common building materials.
'Put a dent in their budget'
Under the proposed settlement, DEQ officials listed only a portion of the highest VCM exceedances detailed in the agency's original violation documents?— 241 between June 2015 and April 2016.
Other allegations raised in the settlement included that CertainTeed didn't use approved methods to test for lingering amounts of VCM in its wastewater and for vinyl chloride in the resin it produced. The settlement also raises air monitoring failures for vinyl chloride in the last months of the plant's life, past water quality and leak testing breakdowns.
Though the VCM exceedances described in the settlement and all the others raised initially by DEQ had been self-reported by CertainTeed, under the proposed settlement, the company would not admit to any alleged violations.?
Louisiana DEQ Secretary Aurelia Giacometto at the Denka Performance Elastomers plant in Laplace on Monday, July 1, 2024. Governor Jeff Landr, back right, said the state was going to ignore the EPA's "attack" on the plant. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
CertainTeed officials said on Tuesday morning that the settlement will allow the company to "fulfill its obligations related to the former Lake Charles facility."
"We appreciate the work of the State of Louisiana and its Department of Environmental Quality in reaching this settlement,” officials said in a statement.
DEQ did not respond to emails seeking comment about the settlement, which is still in the public comment period and has not been approved by the state Attorney General's office.
Cynthia Robertson, executive director of Micah 6:8 Mission, a Lake Charles-area community and environmental justice nonprofit, faulted the size of the fine relative to CertainTeed's financial heft, calling it an inequitable deal.
"It doesn’t put a dent in their budget, and, if it doesn’t put a dent in their budget, we're not going to be able to do anything. These companies are going to keep doing what they're doing," she said.
CertainTeed bills itself as having the leading brand of building products and is the North American arm of the $53 billion French building materials manufacturer Saint-Gobain.
Previous fines for same company
If DEQ officials approve the settlement with CertainTeed, it would be the fourth time the company would have paid state or federal regulators fines to settle alleged environmental violations since it first told agencies it would be winding down the Westlake plant in early 2018, EPA and DEQ records show.
Since January 2018, CertainTeed has paid DEQ and EPA a combined $484,163 in fines to settle alleged drinking water, stalled chemical and process risk planning, and other violations, agency records and statements say.
Landry was still state attorney general then and signed off on at least one of those DEQ fines, worth more than $111,660, in December 2019.
Despite the agency correspondence in early 2018, the planned closure of CertainTeed and loss of around 50 jobs didn't become public until January 2019. CertainTeed opened in the mid-1970s.
At the time, CertainTeed told local?and?industry media?that it could no longer find economically viable suppliers of vinyl chloride monomer to feed its production.
Almost a year after the closure announcement, CertainTeed sold the site to a redevelopment company and passed on its demolition contract to the company. But, during that work in April 2020, a chemical tank caught fire when it was being cut apart with a torch and released vinyl chloride, according to a?DEQ report.
In December 2020, DEQ officials had proposed fining CertainTeed for the blaze over allegations that what caught fire was VCM and constituted a residual hazardous material that had never been reported to DEQ.
During an initial investigation, CertainTeed was unable to produce records for DEQ that showed the tank had been properly emptied, the agency report says.
CertainTeed countered that the company operated the tank, last used in 2012, as a process vessel, not a storage one, and that the process required removal of VCM after every batch of production. What burned was PVC scale in the tank, which isn't legally deemed a hazardous waste, the company said.
Later testing of the scale that remained after the fire showed it wasn't toxic enough to be VCM and so was not hazardous, according to an?agency memo?and a company response.
In mid-August 2024, DEQ officials dropped the allegations, saying they couldn't determine whether the tank contained hazardous VCM at the time of the fire.
Editor's note: A response from CertainTeed was added 10:10 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024.