Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

For more than 100 years, the American Smelting and Refining Co.—better known as Asarco—spewed toxic lead, cadmium and arsenic over El Paso, New Mexico, and Juarez, Mexico. The City of El Paso has been waging a battle with the company since the 1970s to clean up the mess. In “Dirty Money” (Oct. 31, 2008), the Observer detailed the struggle to close down the polluting smelter. Despite community opposition, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality granted a permit last year to restart the smelter, mothballed since 1999 because of depressed copper prices.

Before the copper smelter could reopen, however, it was shuttered for good by the economic crisis, according to Asarco’s vice president of environmental affairs, Thomas Aldrich, in a Feb. 3 news release. “Unfortunately, due to the extreme economic conditions world wide that have occurred during the last six months, we can no longer financially afford to continue,” Aldrich wrote.

Opponents of the smelter say the economy was merely a scapegoat. They believe community activism, and a newly empowered Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, finally forced the company to abandon the project. On the day Asarco made its announcement, the EPA sent two letters warning TCEQ and Asarco officials that tougher federal standards on lead, ozone and particulate matter would make it virtually impossible to reopen the smelter. The federal agency wrote that Asarco’s smelter equipment was “only good for scrap value.”

“These are the first dividends of the Obama administration,” says state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, an El Paso Democrat. “They graded Asarco’s paper, and the company got an F.”

Shapleigh also credits community protests with shutting down the plant. “The permit would have slid through without a problem if communities hadn’t spoken up about it,” he says.

El Paso citizens celebrated on Feb. 9, when TCEQ canceled Asarco’s permit. But it will be a long time before the smelter stack, or its toxic residue, is gone for good. The next hurdle will be cleaning up the mess. “This will probably be the most expensive cleanup of an industrial site in Texas history,” says Neil Carman, the Clean Air Program director for the Sierra Club. “And it will take years to remediate.”

How expensive? TCEQ estimates $52 million. Carman and Shapleigh think it will cost significantly more. Shapleigh points out that a smelter in Washington cost $123 million to remediate.

Since 2005, when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Asarco has been caught in a tug-of-war over ownership. A bid last year to buy the troubled mining company by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal would have created a $1.5 billion fund to clean up Asarco’s toxic legacy across 21 states. The deal was scuttled in October because of the sagging metals market.

More recently, Agarwal has said he still wants to buy the company, but at a significantly lower price. That price would probably mean a smaller environmental trust fund to clean up Asarco’s contaminated sites. The details have yet to be worked out by the bankruptcy judge, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Asarco. Agarwal and his company, Sterlite Industries Ltd., have until March 17 to file a new plan.