Driver/Transportation
DRIVERS Health Care
ADMINISTRATOR General
Wasatch Property Management
Maintenance Tech General
Independent Fire & Safety
Fire Suppression Systems inspector General
Dismas Charities
Security Monitor Trades/Construction
Osmose Utilites
Foremen Sales and Marketing
Electric Supply, Inc
Outside Sales

Tucson-based Asarco LLC is denying allegations that it pretended for years to recycle metals while illegally burning hazardous waste in an El Paso smelter that the company has sought to reopen.

According to a 1998 internal memorandum, the Environmental Protection Agency said Asarco and its Corpus Christi-based subsidiary, Encycle, had a permit to extract metals from hazardous-waste products but used that as a cover to burn the waste until the late 1990s, saving the high costs of proper disposal.

Those allegations against the company are "not new and not true," said Asarco vice president Tom Aldrich in a written statement.

Asarco recycled copper-bearing materials blended with copper concentrate in the early 1990s, but ended the practice in 1997 when the EPA questioned whether the material had sufficient copper content to qualify for recycling, Aldrich said. In 1999, Asarco entered into a consent decree with EPA and the state of Texas that governed future smelting operations, he said.

Among the more than 5,000 tons the company was accused of misrepresenting as containing metals for reclamation were more than 300 tons of nonmetallic residues from the former Army chemical warfare depot at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside Denver. It is not clear what the arsenal's material contained.

"This activity, plain and simple, was illegal treatment and disposal of hazardous waste," the environmental agency said in the memorandum, long held confidential but recently obtained by two El Paso environmental groups opposed to the smelter. "Encycle's own business records provide compelling evidence of sham recycling."

Asarco, which was founded as the American Smelting and Refining Co. in 1899, was purchased by Grupo Mexico in 1999.

In January 2003, Grupo Mexico struck a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that allowed it to split off Asarco's most profitable subsidiary, Southern Peru Copper Corp., in exchange for setting up a $100 million trust fund to cover some of Asarco's environmental liabilities.

Two years later, on Aug. 9, 2005, Asarco filed for bankruptcy protection, blaming environmental and asbestos liabilities, a credit-rating downgrade and a copper strike in Arizona and Texas that was resolved in mid-November.

The company has long faced complaints of contaminating broad swaths of downtown El Paso and borderland areas of Mexico with lead and other dangerous metals, and it has been the target of federal, state and local complaints involving at least 94 sites in 21 states.

But although the environmental agency reached the landmark national cleanup and penalty settlement with Asarco in 1999, the details of the violations had never been disclosed. The El Paso plant was shut down in 1999, but the company is seeking permission to reopen it.

The long-confidential records were obtained from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality through public information requests by the two citizens groups, the Get the Lead Out Coalition and the Sunland Park Grassroots Environmental Group, which provided copies to The New York Times.

"They were supposed to recycle reusable residues," said Heather McMurray, a teacher who requested the records. "They just burned them."

McMurray said the disclosure came as news to her and other activists who had been opposing Asarco for years with claims that pollutants released by the plant caused untold sickness.

EPA memo meant for private use

Michael D. Goodstein, who as a Justice Department environmental lawyer helped negotiate the 1999 settlement with Asarco, said the EPA memorandum detailing Asarco's violations was for internal use and was not meant to become public.

"This was the EPA position, and it was addressed in the enforcement actions and the settlement approved by the judge," said Goodstein, who is out of the government. Although the 122-page settlement does not spell out misdeeds, it commits Asarco to lengthy remedies, including the proper recycling of hazardous waste.

Terry Clawson, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, also said, "You can't say this was unknown."

Clawson pointed to an EPA news release in 1999 that announced the settlement of federal and state claims against Asarco. But the release, while citing the company for "failing to properly manage hazardous waste and otherwise engaging in unlawful recycling practices" and accepting "shipments of unmanifested hazardous waste," does not say specifically that the company burned the waste under a subterfuge.