Bayer CropScience yesterday announced to finally stop producing the Bhopal chemical MIC at its Institute/US plant. An important success after a quarter-century campaign! The company now has to ensure that all workers are offered adequate new jobs. The Coalition against Bayer Dangers, based in Germany, introduced several countermotions to Bayer´s Annual Stockholders´ Meetings demanding that MIC stockpiles in Institute are dismantled and the frequent spills of hazardous substances are stopped.
=> materials on MIC production at Institute: www.cbgnetwork.org/2627.html
=> Letter to Bayer: Stop the sale of highly poisonous pesticides immediately!
January 11, 2011, Public Integrity
Quarter-Century After Bhopal, a Deadly Chemical's U.S. Production to End
The last major U.S. producer of the chemical that killed thousands in Bhopal, India, 26 years ago - and was nearly released in a 2008 explosion in West Virginia - is ceasing production of the compound.
An announcement Tuesday by Bayer CropScience, whose plant in Institute, West Virginia, stores 14,000 pounds of methyl isocyante (MIC), comes slightly more than a week before the U.S. Chemical Safety Board is scheduled to release its final report on a 2008 explosion at the plant. The blast killed two workers, and flying metal came perilously close to breaching an MIC storage tank, board officials said.
Bayer CropScience, a subsidiary of German conglomerate Bayer AG, said on its website the MIC unit in Institute would be "shut down and decommissioned in mid-2012." The company said its decision "was based on a number of factors, with both strategic and economic considerations" - notably, an agreement it struck with the Environmental Protection Agency last year to phase out production of a pesticide called Temik, of which MIC is an ingredient. The pesticide is "no longer economically viable," Bayer CropScience said.
Environmental activists claimed victory, speculating that Bayer CropScience had succumbed to pressure to stop using one of the most lethal chemicals on the planet.
"It's something we've called for for a long time," said Maya Nye, an Institute resident and a spokesperson for People Concerned About MIC. The chemical is "the worst of the worst," she said.
"The handwriting was on the wall," said Rick Hind, legislative director for Greenpeace. "They're the last man standing on a process that's infamous and connected to the world's deadliest industrial accident." The December 1984 leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal killed at least 3,000 people and injured many thousands more. The Bayer CropScience plant in Institute, once owned by Union Carbide, continued making and storing large quantities of MIC long after other companies had cut production for safety reasons.
In its press release, Bayer CropScience said the shutdown of the MIC unit in Institute and its plant in Woodbine, Georgia, would cost about 300 jobs. Hind said he was skeptical of the number. "We welcome the decision on MIC," he said, "but that should not cause any reduction in jobs." By Jim Morris http://www.publicintegrity.org/blog/entry/2823
Statement Maya Nye (Spokesperson People Concerned About MIC):
While this is a monumental step in our 26-year campaign to keep our community safe, we stand in solidarity with the workers in their time of struggle. Job blackmail is a common scare tactic used by corporations to divide communities and hide the bad business practices that threaten worker safety and job security. It is this tactic that holds us economic hostages to corporations who are willing to put profits before people and that compromise our community's health and safety. Our hearts go out to the workers who, over the next several years, will be losing their jobs. Yet we must remember that these jobs were lost to them by a company that chose not to plan ahead, not to change to safer technologies, and not to ensure their future in our community.
January 11, 2011, Charleston Gazette
Bayer to phase out MIC; cut 220 jobs
INSTITUTE, W.Va. -- Bayer CropScience will stop making, using and storing the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate at its Institute plant as part of a corporate restructuring that will cost the Kanawha Valley 220 jobs over the next several years, company officials announced Tuesday.
Bayer officials said the moves are a result of the company's agreement last August to phase out the pesticide aldicarb because of concerns it posed "unacceptable dietary risks," especially to children. Company officials also cited a 1995 pledge by Bayer to move away from products that global public health officials believe are especially dangerous.
Bayer plant manager Steven Hedrick said the jobs being eliminated would include salaried and hourly positions, but that a breakdown was not yet available.
Company officials broke the news to workers in meetings Tuesday morning, though decisions about which positions -- and which individuals -- would be affected had not yet been made.
"We will work collectively with our workforce, developing a solution that is right for our people and right for the business," Hedrick said.
Bayer officials said the timing of their announcement was not related to next week's scheduled release of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's final report on the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two Bayer workers. The CSB's investigation and a related congressional hearing renewed public concern about the Institute plant's quarter-million-pound stockpile of methyl isocyanate, or MIC, the chemical that killed thousands of people in a 1984 leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.
The 220-job reduction leaves about 280 Bayer workers and 200 contract workers at the plant.
Officials from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents hourly employees at Bayer, did not return phone calls.
Kanawha County Commissioner Kent Carper, who expressed grave concerns about the MIC inventory following the 2008 incident at the plant, said the goal of local officials should now be to work with Bayer to find other, "appropriate" businesses to provide jobs at the facility. "That is a good result, assuming that is possible," Carper said. "We have to save as many jobs as we can."
At a press conference at the plant, Hedrick said the facility would stop production of aldicarb, the active ingredient in its Temik brand insecticide, by the end of June 2012. And by June 2011, Bayer also plans to stop production of carbaryl, the active ingredient in the company's well-known Sevin brand pesticide, Hedrick said.
Both products are part of the carbamate family of pesticides, named because they are made in part with carbamic acid, and use MIC as a key ingredient. In a news release, Bayer said that such products have "in recent years ... been largely substituted by newer products," prompting a review by the company of its carbamates business.
Then, in August 2010, Bayer negotiated a deal with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to phase out aldicarb by Dec. 31, 2014. EPA had sought the deal because of agency research that found kids could be exposed to up to eight times the level of the chemical considered safe. Aldicarb had been under EPA scrutiny for years, following the poisoning of banana workers in Costa Rica and consumers of tainted watermelons in Oregon and California in the 1980s. At the time of the EPA deal, Bayer officials said they would close an aldicarb-Temik formulation plant in Woodbine, Ga., but that they didn't yet know what impact it would have on the Institute plant.
But the facility and the products it makes with MIC were already under a variety of pressures.
Following a May 2009 ban on the use of the pesticide carbofuran in food, FMC Corp. in August 2010 stopped producing that material at the Institute site. Leasing plant space at Institute, FMC made carbofuran in part with MIC that it purchased from Bayer.
And Bayer had already announced in August 2009 that it would reduce its MIC inventory by 80 percent, in part by not rebuilding its methomyl-Larvin pesticide unit where the 2008 explosion occurred. A preliminary report from the CSB found that the explosion could have damaged a nearby tank of MIC in the methomyl-Larvin unit, causing a disaster that would have rivaled Bhopal.
"The decisions to exit Temik and to discontinue our methomyl and carbofuran production made it impossible to maintain competitive operations at parts of our Institute site and at the formulation unit at Woodbine," said Chris Evans, senior vice president of Bayer's North American industrial operations.
Maya Nye, spokewoman for the group People Concerned About MIC, said she was still learning details of exactly what Bayer had announced, but was concerned it would be depicted as a case of environmental and public safety protections costing jobs. "Instead of taking the opportunity to lead the industry in developing safer technologies, it has chosen to take a backseat to its competitors while taking the people of this valley as economic hostages," Nye said.
At the Bayer press conference, Evans and Hedrick both referred to a more than 10-year-old company pledge to move away from products listed as "Class I" pesticides by the World Health Organization, but neither would explain why Bayer made that pledge. In a corporate "Sustainable Development Report" posted on its Web site, Bayer says the company decided in 1995 to "gradually replace" such products, which WHO lists as "extremely hazardous. "Bayer CropScience has undertaken to continuously optimize the responsible use of its products," the company report says. "These principles cover the entire life-cycle of a product from development to use and beyond." By Ken Ward Jr.
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