ThyssenKrupp Steel USA Reaches out to Community Stakeholders
03/05/2012 - ThyssenKrupp Steel USA recently issued a communication to community stakeholders regarding an expected fine and other requirements through a consent order to be officially signed this month by the Alabama facility’s Team and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM).
ThyssenKrupp Steel USA recently issued a communication to its neighbors and community stakeholders regarding an expected fine and other requirements through a consent order to be officially signed this month by the Alabama facility’s Team and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM).
In its statement, the company said that “while the details of the consent order cannot be officially made available until that time, we felt it was important to accept responsibility and share this information with our stakeholders in advance of a public announcement by the agency.”
Included below is the official announcement sent by the company.
As may be expected during the commissioning of a start-up facility as large and complex as ours at ThyssenKrupp Steel USA, our Team occasionally discovers issues related to new processes, equipment and procedures that may not be have been immediately evident at the start of our operations. Regrettably, we discovered this to be the case in some areas of routinely scheduled air emission reporting requirements by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM). A number of these issues were identified by our Team through our own internal audits and reported to the agency.
As a result of these reporting issues, ThyssenKrupp Steel USA is expecting to be the subject of a fine and other requirements through a consent order to be officially signed by our Team and ADEM sometime within the month of March.
While the details of the consent order cannot be officially made available until that time, we felt it was important to accept responsibility and share this information with our stakeholders in advance of a public announcement by the agency.
While these findings are unfortunate and regrettable, to our knowledge none have contributed to environmental harm.
In response to these findings, we immediately began restructuring the necessary processes and Teams to effectively manage and control the information reporting as required by our State and Federal permits. We will continue to fully cooperate with the regulating authorities to ensure there are no similar issues in the future.
Our entire Team in Alabama embraces our role of environmental steward in our state and local community. We are committed to meeting our responsibilities and providing leadership on sustainability within our industry, and have demonstrated this through voluntary investment of tens of millions in new and groundbreaking environmental technologies. Strong environmental stewardship has been ThyssenKrupp’s reputation in Europe for generations. We at ThyssenKrupp Steel USA will carry this proud reputation to the NAFTA region.
