Mittal Steel—Cleveland & Cuyahoga County’s Biggest Polluter
Cleveland and Cuyahoga County’s biggest polluter, according to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, is the giant steel mill in The Flats just south of downtown. The facility formerly owned by Republic Steel and LTV Steel is owned today by Mittal Steel, an international company headed by London resident Lakshmi Mittal. Mittal Steel, or ArcelorMittal Steel (the company’s new name since its takeover of Arcelor Steel), currently commands nearly 10 percent of world steel production, making it the largest privately owned steel company in the world. For 2007, the company has reported $19.4 billion in core profits.
While Mittal Steel’s strength is in acquiring steel plants around the world, its weakness is proving to be the management of the plants once it owns them. In May, Tremont neighbor of Mittal Steel Phil Pavarinni, Jr. and I traveled to Luxembourg to meet up with neighbors of Mittal Steel plants from around the world who are dealing with the same soot, rotten egg odors, and noise as Cleveland area neighbors. Together we formed a new group called ‘Global Action on ArcelorMittal,’ including representatives for the Czech Republic, India, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Romania, South Africa, Ukraine and the U.S.
Leading up to the May meeting, Global Action put together a report called In the Wake of ArcelorMittal: the global steel giant’s local impacts, detailing the problems for communities next to current and proposed Mittal Steel mills in nine different countries. We launched the report at a press conference in Luxembourg the morning of Mittal’s annual shareholder meeting, and handed it out at the meeting as well. The report is available on Ohio Citizen Action’s webpage—www.ohiocitizen.org—by clicking on the Arcelor-Mittal Steel link and scrolling down to the web entry on May 14.
Before we left Luxembourg, Global Action on ArcelorMittal sat down with Michel Wurth, one of Mittal Steel’s board members. He said the company is interested in dialogues with Global Action and has written since this meeting that the company would like to “further elaborate upon our existing initiatives and program to address issues [we] have raised…” While Mittal Steel’s executives work on their response to our group, Global Action will continue to raise the issue of pollution prevention globally in the media, expand membership in the group, and work on joint activities to document the pollution problems from the company.
Member groups of Global Action also continue to work locally on their campaigns to get Mittal Steel to modernize its plants. Here in the Cleveland area, Ohio Citizen Action has just released a short documentary film titled Mittal Steel: Clean Up for Real. We premiered the film at Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art in June and are continuing to screen the documentary in the Cleveland area this summer. You can also view the documentary on our website at www.ohiocitizen.org.
For more information, contact Liz Ilg at Ohio Citizen Action at 216-861-5200, ext. 305; lilg@ohiocitizen.org or visit www.ohiocitizen.org.
August/September 2008 Contents