Baxter Healthcorp Ends Prop. 65 Suit by Paying $600,000
Baxter Healthcare Corp. has agreed to pay $600,000 to settle allegations that it inadequately warned communities of potentially cancer-causing emissions at its plants in Irvine and Irwindale, the state attorney general announced Wednesday.
The payment is the first in Orange County stemming from Proposition 65, the sweeping anti-toxics initiative that California voters approved in 1986. The law requires businesses to provide “clear and reasonable” warnings to people exposed to chemicals that are known to cause cancer.
Deputy Atty. Gen. Ed Weil said that the health-care company failed to properly warn the public from early 1988 until the lawsuits were filed in July, 1990. Instead, he said, the company provided “small, hard-to-read notices tucked into the middle of newspapers.”
Baxter will pay a $200,000 fine to settle the case concerning its Irvine-based subsidiary, Bentley Laboratories Inc. The company vented ethylene oxide into the air during sterilization of medical devices. Bentley recently stopped manufacturing there, so emissions of the chemical, which is known to cause cancer and birth defects, have ended, Weil said.
To settle the alleged violations at the Irwindale plant, in Los Angeles County, the company has agreed to pay a $358,000 fine and surrender $42,000 worth of air quality credits. These credits, provided by the region’s air quality agency, could have been sold to another company which would then be allowed to emit 7,600 pounds of smog-causing chemicals into the air per year. Instead, as part of the settlement, the credits will not be used and the emissions will not be allowed, Weil said.
Also, the Irwindale plant will provide proper community warnings in newspapers until the end of the year, when the company says it will stop emissions there.
Baxter HealthCare officials, based in Illinois, were unavailable for comment late Thursday. The company’s Los Angeles attorney did not return phone calls.
Weil said that the settlement should serve to warn other companies that wrongly believe they are satisfying the law by buying small ads in newspapers. State officials say companies that are emitting carcinogenic chemicals should ideally send letters to people living within range of the fumes, he said.
“Baxter had published a little notice, maybe less than the size of a message slip. A couple inches by a couple inches,” Weil said. “It was not big enough to be seen. If you really do have a duty to warn, you’re not going to satisfy it unless the ad meets the requirement of the law, which is that the affected people have to be reasonably likely to see them.”
The two cases against Baxter were among five cases that the state office filed last year against companies that emit ethylene oxide, which is widely used to sterilize equipment. One other, filed against Sterilization Services in Anaheim, is still pending.
