Ardagh Group’s glass foundry is reflected in a puddle.

Company says it is reducing pollution

The company says it is doing everything it is supposed to under government pollution permits, including working to correct instances of exceeding water pollution limits.

“We care about our neighbors,” said Joshua Markus, Ardagh’s general counsel for North America.

Markus emphasized in an interview that the company is working hard to improve its environmental performance. The company says it already has invested $3.5 million in technology to reduce emissions from one of its furnaces, run a street sweeper for eight hours a day to reduce pollutants running off into the Duwamish River and hire a full-time environmental engineer, one of only two such positions assigned to a single plant in the multinational company’s 13 North American glass plants, according to Ardagh.

Even though Ardagh tops the list of industrial soot producers in the region, Markus argued that the plant’s contribution to air pollution in south Seattle pales in comparison with two nonindustrial sources of soot: vehicles, including cars and trucks; and residents burning wood in fireplaces and wood stoves in winter to keep warm.

Those are definitely major air-pollution sources in South Seattle. The area is crisscrossed by major highways and arterial streets frequented by trucks serving the nearby Port of Seattle, many of which are older diesel models that are notoriously dirty. And the neighborhood is a hot spot for people who burn wood, because that’s a cheap way to keep warm.

The company and its predecessors have been at the same location for more than 50 years, Markus noted, and Ardagh was unhappy when the county, instead of renewing the lease, decided to seek bids from other companies interested in using the property.

“This is very unfair treatment, and [we] don’t understand the county’s desire to replace us as a tenant,” Markus said, adding that such a move “would have many negative attributes, whether it be environmental, certainly on jobs, certainly on the recycling system of King County and the city of Seattle.”

The county’s public notice that the land is for lease envisioned a warehouse as an alternative to a glass plant. Ardagh stated in a document submitted to county officials that those jobs would pay perhaps $16 per hour versus the $28 an hour earned by Ardagh employees. Employees also receive benefits that, according to company spokeswoman Katie Skipper, include “a pension, 401(k) and a generous health care plan, along with vacation and holiday pay." She added that the average compensation for union employees, including benefits, is $90,000 a year. That figure, though, includes an 8 percent payroll tax that is not paid to employees.

Operating 24 hours a day for 365 days per year, the glass recycling plant in 2018 released 161 tons of soot, known in the environmental regulation field as “fine particulate matter,” into the air, according to records of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. In fact, in 2018, government records show Ardagh emitted more soot than the next six largest emitters in the region put together.

Traffic whirs past Ardagh Group’s glass foundry building.

Ardagh is also the region’s largest source of sulfur dioxide pollution, the Clean Air Agency’s records show. That chemical makes breathing difficult for asthmatics and can cause wheezing, shortness of breath and chest tightness. The company has not been cited for discharging this pollution due to the fact that its emissions are under the limits specified in its government-issued permit.

The Clean Air Agency’s data also show that the plant regionally is the second largest emitter of nitrogen oxides, the third largest polluter of a class of compounds called toxic air contaminants. It's also among the top 10 emitters of carbon monoxide, hazardous air pollutants and volatile organic compounds, although those pollutants are not regulated under the facility's government-issued permit because the levels emitted are considered too small to be regulated.

A document provided by the company to King County and obtained by InvestigateWest under the Washington Public Records Act shows that the company has had several run-ins with governmental environmental agencies in the past few years.

The document reveals that the company has been in trouble with the state Department of Ecology as recently as November 2018. State inspectors cited the firm for four violations of rules regulating how much toxic zinc and copper and how much turbidity is allowed in rainwater draining off the property into the Duwamish River.

Markus said the company takes stormwater runoff regulations “very seriously.”

“We have had some challenges with runoff, and we’ve been working with the state Department of Ecology to correct” the violations, Markus said. “I’m happy to report the effort is paying off.” The state granted the company a one-year extension until September 2020 to design and install a stormwater treatment system to control the problem. In the meantime, the company is using a street sweeper to keep pollutants out of rainwater runoff.

Within the last three years and three months, the company violated state limits four times in wastewater it dumped into the Duwamish River, according to a document submitted to the county by the company in June 2019. The company said malfunctioning equipment caused three violations, and the fourth was caused by a leak; all were corrected.

As for air pollution, Ardagh in recent years received violation notices for at least four infractions involving failing to test its emissions, failing to submit test results and failing emissions tests it did conduct, according to the document the company submitted to King County in June. Those all occurred within the last three years and three months.

The company earlier this year closed the most pollution-prone of the five furnaces at the plant. In the document filed with King County, the company said it shut down the offending furnace “as a result of lower demand due to foreign imports.” In the interview with InvestigateWest, company lawyer Markus said, “This was a very difficult decision for us because it directly resulted in the loss of about 50 jobs.”

Ardagh is seeking to renew a lease on 17 riverside acres that is across the street west of the main Ardagh plant on East Marginal Way South.

It’s unclear whether Ardagh’s bid to renew its lease on these 17 riverside acres would pay King County as much as competing companies that would operate a warehouse there. That’s because state law exempts other companies’ bids, like Ardagh’s, from the Public Records Act, until one company is declared the apparent winner in the bidding contest. The county has not disclosed the other bidders, so it is not known how many jobs and what kind of wages Ardagh’s competitors are offering.

Once a company is declared the apparent winner of the bidding process, the public is allowed to learn the name of that company and the bid price, and see how much each bidding company would've been willing to pay to lease the land.

The 17 acres the company leases from the county represent only a portion of Ardagh’s operation, the strip of land between the main plant and the river. On that strip are two subtenants of Ardagh that handle incoming glass and provide lime for the production process. Replacing that with a warehouse would mean additional truck traffic in the area, Ardagh argued, including big rigs trying to make challenging right-hand turns off already-crowded East Marginal Way South.

Unions representing Ardagh’s workers are lobbying heavily to keep the plant alive.

“If our plant is forced to close because of an incoming warehouse, our jobs would be replaced by low-wage jobs with high turnover rates,” said a letter to county officials by members of United Steelworkers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. It was signed by more than 175 workers.

The plant is located in one of Seattle’s most industrialized districts, one that has been a center of manufacturing since early last century. That has left widespread environmental contamination. In fact, the Duwamish River, immediately adjacent to the plant, is undergoing a major cleanup in the federal Superfund program.

Preparations for the Superfund cleanup included a study establishing that in the 98108 ZIP code adjacent to the Ardagh plant, which includes the South Park and Georgetown neighborhoods, has the highest “cumulative impact score” of 10 ZIP codes studied when it comes to negative socioeconomic, environmental and public health characteristics.

On air pollution, the neighborhood came in second below Eastlake, which sits right below Interstate 5.

The study was spearheaded by the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, a nonprofit coalition of environmentalists, neighborhood groups, local businesses and the Duwamish Indian Tribe. The coalition was officially designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a “Technical Advisory Group” to give the community a say in the Superfund cleanup.