3M Agrees to Sell Air-Pollution Credits : Environment: Procter & Gamble’s purchase will increase the output of paper products at its Oxnard plant. The transaction will add 50 tons of impurities a year into the air.
One of Ventura County’s largest employers, 3M Corp. in Camarillo, has agreed to sell 78 tons of “banked” pollution credits to Procter & Gamble Co.’s Oxnard plant in a deal environmentalists said would undermine the county’s smog-control efforts.
The deal, the biggest of its kind in county history, would allow P&G; to dump up to 50 additional tons of pollutants a year into the county’s air. The agreement would allow the company to proceed with plans to double its output of Charmin and Bounty paper products.
The transaction, involving an undisclosed amount of cash, is made possible by a 1977 amendment to the Federal Clean Air Act allowing companies that reduce air pollution emissions below a base rate to place the amount of the reduction in a reserve account. The companies can draw on the account for later expansion or, as 3M plans to do, sell the credits to another firm.
Karl Krause, head engineer of the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District, said the sale has received preliminary approval from the district but still must be approved by state and federal authorities.
“It would be very unusual if it were turned down at this stage,” said Krause, who expects final approval by mid-August. Public hearings are not required, he said.
Matt Haber of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency office in San Francisco said the EPA will seek modifications in the huge paper-producing machinery P&G; hopes to install. “But at this stage, I don’t know whether we’ll comment on the trade-off of the emission credits,” he said.
Krause said about a dozen pollution offsets have taken place in the county since it began allowing them in 1984, “but this is by far the largest.” In one of the earlier deals, the Chevron oil company leased pollution credits to Texaco, allowing the latter to proceed with construction of an oil-drilling platform in the Santa Barbara Channel, Krause said.
Environmentalists said they hope to block the sale or at least force changes in the arrangement.
“When 3M’s pollution credits were sitting in the bank, nobody was breathing them,” said Pat Baggerly, a board member of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County. “Now that they’re coming out of the bank, people will be breathing more pollutants. So we’re concerned.”
Baggerly said the coalition has sent letters objecting to the deal to the APCD, the EPA and the California Air Resources Board.
“We want the APCD to look very closely at what it is doing,” Baggerly said.
Cynthia Leake, vice president of the Environmental Coalition and an official of the Sierra Club in Ventura County, said she opposes the trading of pollution credits among companies. “Why, they’re even going to start trading them on the stock market. That’s ridiculous.” The Chicago Board of Trade voted last week to create a futures market in rights to emit sulfur dioxide.
“That air pollution isn’t going to stay in Oxnard,” Leake said. “It’s going to blow right back to Camarillo, and to Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley too.”
Procter & Gamble now employs 400 workers in its paper-products plant south of the Ventura Freeway on Rice Avenue. About 200 will be added to the payroll if the company is allowed to purchase the pollution credits, said Henry J. Racine, a spokesman for the unit, known as Procter & Gamble Paper Products Co.
“We feel we are striking a balance between the impact this will have on air quality and the economic benefits that Oxnard and the entire county will receive,” he said.
Racine said the two companies have signed a letter of intent, but he declined to say how much money is involved.
The pollutant trade-off is based on a formula that requires some of 3M’s credits to be retired permanently. Thus P&G; will pay for 78 tons of the 104 tons in the 3M account but will receive only 50 tons in emission credits.
“As a result, 28 tons of pollutants annually are being taken out of the atmosphere,” Racine said.
The distance of about nine miles between the two plants helps determine the tonnage credits that must be retired, officials of the companies said.
The 3M unit on Lewis Road, known as 3M Data Storage Products, employs 875 workers and is the world’s largest producer of magnetic tapes and other products used in storing information, according to production chief Gary L. Wess.
Wess said 3M received the emission credits as a result of an $8.3-million emission-reduction drive. An earlier anti-smog program earned 146 tons of credits, he said, but those have been donated to the county and will not be used.
Procter & Gamble announced plans in March to step up production at its 140-acre Oxnard facility. The expansion will involve new machinery but no new construction, Racine said.
