Avery Label Named Among Top Polluters : Pollution: The Monrovia factory is ranked fourth in hydrocarbon emissions. But the company plans to improve its record.
Nestled in an industrial park on California Avenue, Avery Label Systems turns out 50-billion square inches of labeling material a year.
Its front building is nondescript. Its smokestacks do not belch brown fumes. In fact, the gases leaving the chimneys aren’t even visible.
But in 1988, the factory generated 1,076 tons of reactive hydrocarbons and was ranked as the fourth-largest industrial emitter of the gases in Southern California, according to a report released last week by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Avery was the only San Gabriel Valley firm named.
The company makes its label materials by coating paper and polyester with adhesives dissolved in solvents. Inside the plant, metallic ducts snake over and under the pulsing machinery, sucking up vapors that evaporate from the petroleum-based solvents.
The gases are whisked into a 50-foot-high incinerator to be destroyed at 1,500 degrees, then released through the chimneys.
Invariably, some particles, or “fugitives,” elude destruction and escape into the atmosphere as reactive hydrocarbons. They react in sunlight with nitrogen oxides in the air to form ozone, identified by the AQMD as a major component of smog and the most serious pollutant in the region.
Chevron USA in El Segundo, ARCO in Carson and Shell Oil in Wilmington topped the smog agency’s list, with Chevron leading at 1,426 tons.
Behind them came Avery Label Systems, a subsidiary of Pasadena-based Avery International. The Monrovia facility also made the AQMD’s 1987 list, ranking ninth with hydrocarbon emissions of 429 tons, and placed 14th on the smog agency’s 1986 list, with 371 tons. In the report released last week, another Avery company plant in Rancho Cucamonga was ranked 14.
“We are disappointed in these rankings,” Avery International Chairman Charles Miller wrote in a January letter to Monrovia Mayor Bob Bartlett. “I am determined that we will significantly improve our emission record.”
Avery, a Fortune 300 company with offices in 25 countries, has invited the City Council to tour the factory.
Since a flaw in its emission-control equipment was discovered in mid-1988, the firm has spent more than $1 million in improvements at the 40-year-old facility, company officials said. Installation of a new incinerator, designed to destroy about 99% of the hydrocarbons in the system, was completed in 1989 at a cost of $700,000. Other repairs included patching duct leaks and replacing doors to ovens where the adhesive-coated materials are dried.
Avery claims that its preliminary tests show that hydrocarbon emissions dropped to 650 tons in 1989. The firm projects further reductions, to 300 tons, this year.
The firm’s emission levels are legal, said AQMD spokesman Dave Rutherford, although his agency sought court-imposed penalties totaling $2,625 against Avery in 1985 and 1986 for excessive emissions, permit violations and a public nuisance complaint.
Avery obtained a variance in November, 1988, allowing it to temporarily exceed legal emission levels while it worked to identify and solve the problem, said Teddy Chung, general manager of the Monrovia plant. The AQMD lifted the variance last June when Avery promised to install a new incinerator.
The plant, which has a staff of about 100, goes through about 30,000 tons of solvents a year, Chung said. The self-adhesive materials produced are converted for uses ranging from product identification logos to address labels and bar codes.
In the AQMD announcement last week, another San Gabriel Valley firm was ranked on a separate list of the 20 biggest Southern California producers of nitrogen oxides, which also contribute to ozone formation. The Pomona plant of San Francisco-based Simpson Paper Co. was listed 19th. It was the company’s first appearance on the list, smog agency officials said.
Simpson is seeking permission from AQMD to change from using water injection to steam injection in a turbine engine to reduce emissions at the paper mill, spokeswoman Maureen Frisch said.
AVERY EMISSIONSAnnual hydrocarbon emissions from Avery International’s plant in Monrovia.
1985 362 tons
1986 371 tons
1987 429 tons
1988 1,076 tons
Source: South Coast Air Quality Management District
Avery International’s projected emissions
1989 650 tons
1990 300 tons
Source: Avery International
