Ohio Citizen Action, Ohio's "largest environmental organization" called out Mittel Steel for what can be construed as creative emission accounting. Basically Mittel is using historic industry averages as reported values for pollution emission instead of measuring output from it's blast furnaces. Ohio Citizen Action states that these blast furnaces are "the facility’s biggest sources of fine and coarse particle pollution, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and organic chemicals."Mittel is using a "loophole" in Federal Air Pollution reporting rules, claims OCA, which is also claiming that the historic average of industry pollution emissions contains samples of steel plants that utilize improved control equipment. You can read more about it in Smoke and Mirrors: Mittal Steel's Playbook to Cover Up Their Pollution (4 Megs Word .doc).
While the area here is indeed murky and one could well point out that it is the Federal Air Polluting reporting rules that are at fault and Mittal is complying to the letter of the law (perhaps not the intent). I want to attempt to put in my opinion that while I do see Mittal's reporting technique indeed shady and perhaps dishonest I don't believe that the problem rests on their laurels as greatly as it does on our own for not demanding change in Federal Regulation. I am disappointed that it takes the poisoning of our communities to drive people to action instead of more altruistic means but perhaps that is what it takes to spur our society into action.
The question remains, how do we change this? How can we affect the Federal Regulation? Can we catch the ear of Congress in an attempt to create more stringent regulations? I hope so.
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