THE RIGHT CHEMISTRY : Makers of Everything From Paint to Gasoline Thrive in the Southland Despite Tough Pollution Controls
At his factory in the City of Commerce, Herbert Kraft keeps two trucks full of kitty litter for emergencies.
Kraft is not preparing for accidents of the feline variety at American Vanguard Corp. but for the occasional chemical spill at the company, which makes agricultural pesticides.
“We suck it up with kitty litter,” said Kraft, chairman and chief executive of the fast-growing company. “We can surround anything with that.”
Kitty litter is one of the more unusual measures American Vanguard has adopted to keep on top of safety concerns as well as air pollution rules and other standards for the highly regulated chemical industry.
It is a business not often associated with Southern California, better known as the home of Tinseltown and tourism, aerospace and apparel--all big employers with just the right tinge of glamour. Gone are most of the steelmakers and all of the tire manufacturers, the sort of basic manufacturing that is more in keeping with the image of the Rust Belt.
Yet, somehow, California has managed to remain the third-biggest state for employment in the nation’s chemical industry (Texas and New Jersey rank first and second) and more than half of those jobs are clustered around the Southland. And in Southern California, which has some of the toughest air pollution regulations in the United States, the chemical business is not always an easy one to be in.
The chemical industry is broadly based, including not only basic chemical manufacturing but also the production of such everyday things as paints, drugs and cleaners.
“Most people think of the chemical industry as being refineries, but that’s not how it is. That’s not how the chemical industry touches most people’s lives,” said William J. Peters, president of Trail Chemical Co. of El Monte.
“When you’re putting chlorine in your pool, you’re putting in chemicals,” he said. “Bleach, detergent, gasoline . . . it’s all part of the chemical industry.”
The industry employed 53,000 workers in California in 1984, the latest statewide numbers available, according to the Chemical Industry Council of California, a Sacramento-based trade group. There are more than 1,400 chemical firms in the state with an annual payroll topping $1.1 billion, the group said.
The state industry shipped nearly $8.5 billion worth of products that year, the group said. In addition, California’s chemical companies supply thousands of firms in the aerospace, electronics, metal finishing and other industries.
Despite California’s significance in the national chemical scene, on the home front it “barely makes the list,” quipped Richard L. Davis, executive director of the Chemical Industry Council of California.
“The California economy is so big that the chemical industry ranks way down there,” he said. “Nobody realizes there’s a chemical industry out here.”
Employment Little Changed
In Los Angeles County, the chemical business ranks 10th among manufacturers and 32nd among industries in general.
“When you think of chemicals, you don’t think of Los Angeles,” said Jack Kyser, economist for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “There are a lot of things you’d think of before you get to chemicals. That’s one of the surprising things about Los Angeles.”
Employment has changed little in the past 15 years partly because of factory automation, said J. Gordon Palmer Jr., manager of economic analysis and development programs for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.
In 1987, the industry employed about 28,000 workers in Los Angeles County, up from 27,000 in 1972, Palmer said. Most of the growth since 1972 has been in Orange County, where employment jumped to about 9,000 from 4,000, he said.
“It hasn’t grown much and it hasn’t shrunk much, it’s just sort of sat there,” he said.
Part of the anonymity can be traced to the type of chemical companies that exist in California, particularly in the South, Davis said.
While Southern California does have large well-known companies--Dow Chemical and Union Carbide among them--there are very few big manufacturers of basic chemicals in the state, he said. Most companies are small and make chemicals out of other chemicals or products that are not often thought of as chemicals. Paint makers, drug manufacturers, detergent producers and cosmetics makers are all considered part of the chemical industry.
Radical Adjustments
Doing business in Southern California can pose some unique problems for chemical companies because of the area’s strict air pollution control ordinances and other regulations and the scarcity of places to legally dump hazardous wastes.
The paint manufacturing segment of the chemical industry in particular has had to make radical adjustments in the past year to produce oil-base paints and coatings with low enough solvent levels to meet stricter air pollution standards. More recently, area furniture manufacturers, automobile paint shops and the South Coast Air Quality Management District have clashed over a proposed crackdown on the way paint, varnish and other coatings are applied to wood furniture and cabinets as well as paint for cars.
Peters of Trail Chemical, an industrial coatings manufacturer, said he knows of some businesses that are thinking of moving their industrial coating and painting operations to Mexico to avoid the regulations.
“I would say most people are simply adapting, not moving,” he said. “They’re here and their vested interest is here in real estate and equipment and those things are not easily moved.”
Other than the paint industry regulations, the AQMD said it has not particularly targeted the chemical industry in its rule making. Nonetheless, the industry has a long list of local, state and federal regulations on pollution control and safety with which it must comply.
“This comes as a shock to everyone but we (the chemical industry) are not a major contributor to the waste stream and air pollution problems,” Davis said. “Because we live with chemicals, we’re the industry that’s (adapted).”
In the wake of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster in India, the industry took a careful look at its safety measures and emergency preparedness plans and found that “a large majority of chemical facilities in California are well prepared to cope with emergencies within the facility site,” according to a report prepared for Gov. George Deukmejian by the Chemical Industry Council.
Still, accidents do occur--such as the one early this month when a toxic cloud escaped from a chemical plant in the City of Industry, resulting in eight injuries and the evacuation of about 700 people in a four-square-mile area. In addition, Southern California has its share of hazardous waste sites traced to dumping in past years by chemical companies and firms that use chemicals in manufacturing.
Kraft says American Vanguard’s chemical plant was out of commission for only a few hours after the October earthquake despite its proximity to the epicenter in Whittier. The company has regular emergency drills to prepare for a wide range of mishaps in addition to earthquakes. Workers, air and water in the factory are constantly monitored for contamination.
HASA Redesigned Plant
“We made a decision about 12 years ago that in order to continue in the chemical business, anytime they would pass a rule we would comply,” Kraft said. “We have found that most other people don’t want to do that so they have begun to drop out and we fill the vacuum.
“We geared up a long time ago so when they started passing these rules, it didn’t matter,” he said.
HASA Inc. of Saugus, a producer of swimming pool chemicals with $8 million in annual sales, was in a similar position about six years ago, President Don Wilson said.
“We used to put all our waste water in the ground” or they would truck water and used plastic bottles to dumps, he said. Then “Los Angeles County and the state got on us so bad and the cost of hauling the stuff to the dump got prohibitive.”
Wilson redesigned the plant so that water would flow to a gutter in the center that would take it to be recycled into the company’s product. Plastic bottles are now crushed and sold to the plastics industry.
“I decided to go to work and solve our own problem,” Wislon said. “Everything we use is regenerated.”
At Filtrol Corp., which produces light gray dust particles called fluid cracking catalysts that allow refineries to produce gas more cheaply, dust containment at its Vernon factory is the main environmental concern.
“So we have to have very tight containment,” said Dave Kjos, director of operations for Filtrol, a 312-employee subsidiary of Oakland-based KaiserTech. However, Kjos added, the company would have to do the same anywhere in the United States.
“I don’t think the regulations are any tougher here than anywhere else,” he said. Regulations such as the 1986 anti-toxics initiative known as Proposition 65 “mean additional paper work, additional auditing, additional training and that sort of thing, but it’s all for the right purpose and we don’t have a problem with them.”
The many regulations “feel like a hardship only because of the frustration and the tremendous amount of paper work that goes on, but it’s not going to put anybody out of business,” Davis said.
In fact, it’s not even slowing down industry growth, he said.
“Frankly, in spite of the attempts by our government to put us out of business, we’re doing very well,” Davis said. “I don’t see any evidence of the chemical industry leaving California. In fact, the opposite is true because the market is here.”
