| AUSTIN
- April 9 - Three citizens groups and federal regulators have
reached a settlement with Alcoa over allegations that the aluminum
giant illegally released more then one million tons of air pollution
from its Rockdale, Texas, facility over the past 17 years.
Under terms
submitted Tuesday for approval in federal district court, Alcoa
will be required to reduce immediately its emissions of harmful
pollutants from the Rockdale smelter. The company must make
even larger pollution reductions over the next few years.
The settlement
requires Alcoa to pay the U.S. Treasury a $1.5 million fine.
Alcoa also must spend $2.5 million on two environmental mitigation
projects in Central Texas: a land purchase project and a project
to reduce emissions from school buses.
The lawsuit
against Alcoa by the citizens groups – and related allegations
subsequently lodged against Alcoa by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and the Texas Commission on Environmental
Quality (TCEQ) – were prompted when Neighbors for Neighbors
uncovered extensive evidence that Alcoa had been violating the
Clean Air Act.
Billie Woods,
Neighbors for Neighbors president, said, "The bottom line
for us was to make Alcoa reduce some of its air pollution now,
not just promise to do so five or 10 years down the road."
Neighbors
for Neighbors and two national organizations, Environmental
Defense and Public Citizen, filed suit against Alcoa in federal
district court in Austin in 2001. The suit alleged that in the
mid-1980s, Alcoa essentially rebuilt its three power generating
units at the Rockdale plant without installing any new air pollution
control equipment or obtaining a required Clean Air Act permit.
Had Alcoa followed the law then, Texas would have been spared
more than one million tons of excess pollution.
For years,
Alcoa’s Rockdale plant has been the state’s largest
"grandfathered" polluter, spewing more than 100,000
tons of air emissions annually. Grandfathered polluters generally
are exempt from post-1971 Clean Air Act standards.
Working
from the Neighbors group’s findings, the EPA and TCEQ cited
Alcoa for violating the "new source review" provisions
of the Clean Air Act. Under new source review, a grandfathered
plant is no longer exempted from having to install modern pollution
controls if it overhauls its facilities and emits more pollution
than it did before. The Bush administration has proposed that
new source review be largely eliminated.
Jim Marston,
Texas director for Environmental Defense, said, "This settlement
shows that new source review is a valuable tool in cleaning
our air and keeping polluters in check. It enabled a small band
of citizens to stand up to a big polluter and win."
The settlement
requires that Alcoa take interim measures to reduce air pollution
from its Rockdale plant until it either installs new pollution
control equipment on its three power units or builds new units
with modern pollution controls. A third option available through
the settlement calls for Alcoa to shut down the three units
and rely on electricity from other sources, such as a fourth,
less-polluting Rockdale power unit owned and operated by Texas
Utilities.
The deadline
for Alcoa to choose one of the three options likely will be
sometime in the summer of 2004, Woods said. If Alcoa chooses
to shut down its three units, it would be required to do so
by the end of 2006.
The interim
measures required of Alcoa include reducing in June its emissions
of sulfur dioxide (SO2) from the three power-generating units
by some 7,000 to 8,000 tons annually (the plant currently emits
more than 60,000 tons of SO2 each year). Other interim measures
involve immediate reductions in nitrogen oxide and particulate
matter emitted by the three units.
Over the
long-term, the settlement will require Alcoa to reduce its emissions
of SO2 by about 95 percent and reduce nitrogen oxide and particulate
matter by about 90 percent.
Woods said
her group would have preferred that the settlement require Alcoa
to make larger reductions sooner and to pay a fine more in line
with the profits it made by violating the law.
"But
given current efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act, the settlement
is the best we could probably hope for," she said.
The settlement
requires Alcoa to spend $1.75 million to fund the purchase of
threatened lands in Bastrop and Lee counties, with the land
being held by the Pines and Prairies Land Trust and the Trust
for Public Land. Alcoa also must spend $750,000 to fund a school
bus emission reduction program in Central Texas.
Kelly Haragan,
staff attorney for Public Citizen’s Texas office, said,
"Alcoa has long been one of Texas’ biggest air polluters.
This settlement not only means cleaner air for Texans to breathe,
but is a great testament to what ordinary citizens can accomplish."
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