Environment

Getting Corporations to Do the Right Thing

pinklid I admit it—the Dirt Diggers Digest is guilty of focusing on the bad news about corporate misdeeds. So in this post I will write about something positive: activist groups that are succeeding in changing corporate behavior for the better.

The occasion for this shift in emphasis is the recent announcement of the winners of the BENNY awards, which are given out by the Business Ethics Network. BEN is an association of organizations and individuals involved in corporate campaigns that seek to pressure companies to end injurious practices relating to the environment, public health and the workplace. (Full disclosure: I have served on BEN’s advisory committee.)

Since 2005 BEN has been giving awards celebrating outstanding victories. During the past few years it has also honored groups that are making progress toward such victories and given individual achievement awards to veteran campaigners.

Each time attend the awards ceremony and hear the descriptions of the campaigns, I find my skeptical shell melting away in a wave of optimism about the prospects for undoing corporate harm. This year was no different.

There was a tie for 1^st place in the main BENNY award between the Campaign for Fair Food and Think Before You Pink: “Yoplait—Put A Lid On It!”

The Campaign—led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and supported by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and others in the Alliance for Fair Food—has made great strides in improving the working conditions of immigrant farmworkers in southern Florida. The campaign has won a string of victories by going around the growers who are the direct employers of the workers and pressuring their major customers (fast food giants, supermarket chains, and major food service companies) to pay more for the produce with the understanding that the difference will go toward higher wages.

Think Before You Pink is a campaign led by Breast Cancer Action that has taken a critical approach toward the growing corporate practice of putting pink ribbons on their products to raise awareness of breast cancer. The campaign started out examining whether those companies are contributing a significant portion of the purchase price toward legitimate cancer research. More recently, it has challenged pink-ribbon companies that make products that have been linked to breast cancer (the campaign calls it “pinkwashing”).

One of its recent targets was Eli Lilly, which sells drugs meant to reduce the risk of breast cancer while at the same time distributing rGBH, an artificial growth hormone used by dairies that is a suspected carcinogen. Earlier this year, the Think Before You Pink campaign got General Mills to stop using rBGH in its Yoplait yogurt, which has extensively used pink-ribbon marketing.

BEN gave its first-place Path to Victory award to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, which is seeking to reduce use of the climate-destroying black fuel through efforts such as organizing students at campuses which depend on coal-generated electricity. The campaign, which is targeting some schools smack in the middle of coal country, has released a tongue-in-cheek online video with the tagline “Coal is Too Dirty Even for College.”

The Individual Achievement Award went to Sister Pat Daly, a veteran shareholder activist who heads the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, an alliance of Roman Catholic groups in the New York City metropolitan area. She is best known as one of the founders of Campaign ExxonMobil, which pioneered the effort to get the giant oil company to take a less irresponsible position on climate change.

At the BEN awards ceremony, Sister Pat also described facing down former General Electric CEO Jack Welch at a company board meeting. For years, she and other activists had been pressing GE to accept responsibility for cleaning up the PCB contamination it had caused in New York’s Hudson River. And for years the company resisted. Welch’s successor Jeff Immelt eventually relented, and in May 2009 a clean-up effort financed by GE finally began. Sister Pat’s role in that victory certainly deserved to be honored.

Whether over the course of months or decades, the kinds of campaigns celebrated by the BENNY Awards show that corporations can be made to do the right thing.

Shades of Green

Michael Moore may be on all the talk shows these days touting his new film on the evils of capitalism, but elsewhere in the mainstream media the celebration of big business continues apace. Especially when it comes to the environment, we are meant to believe that large corporations are at the forefront of enlightened thinking.

This is the implicit message of the cover of the new issue of Newsweek, which is filled with leaves to promote its feature on “The Greenest Big Companies in America: An Exclusive Ranking.” The list itself, however, has more validity than the usual exercises of this sort, which tend to take much of corporate greenwash at face value.

The Newsweek rankings are based on what appear to be solid data from KLD Research & Analytics, producer of the reputable (but expensive) SOCRATES social investing database, along with Trucost and CorporateRegister.com. Each company in the S&P 500 is rated on its environmental impact, its environmental policies, and its reputation among corporate social responsibility professionals, academics and other environmental experts. The ratings even take in account a company’s “regulatory infractions, lawsuits and community impacts.”

Not surprisingly, those at the top of the list are high-tech companies—such as Hewlett-Packard (ranked No. 1), Dell (2), Intel (4), IBM (5) and Cisco Systems (12)—which have never had quite the same pollution problems as old-line industries and which in many cases have made themselves “cleaner” by outsourcing their production activities to overseas producers. Dell, in particular, is on its way to becoming a hollow company by selling off its plants.

More interesting is that supposed sustainability pioneer Wal-Mart comes in at No. 59, behind old-line industrial companies such as United Technologies and Owens Corning. Whole Foods Market, purveyor of over-priced organic groceries, is a bit lower at 67. Oil giant Chevron, which urges the public to “join us” in its supposed commitment to energy efficiency, is ranked 371, not much better than long-time global warming denier ExxonMobil (395).

Since the Newsweek list covers the entirety of the S&P 500, we can also look at what is probably the most significant group: those at the very bottom. The harm that these companies—especially utilities such as American Electric Power and Southern Company with lots of fossil-fuel-fired power plants—do to the environment far outweighs any good done by those at the top of the list. Also among the laggards are agribusiness giants Monsanto (No. 485), Archer Daniels Midland (486), Bunge (493) and ConAgra Foods (497).

But special mention must be given to the absolute worst company of all: mining giant Peabody Energy. On a scale of 0 to 100, Peabody is awarded all of 1 point, presumably reflecting its single-minded dedication to climate-destroying coal and its support for groups fighting the climate bill now in Congress.

Newsweek deserves credit for undertaking a serious evaluation of corporate environmental performance. The web version even has a nice sidebar on green fakery. But the magazine could have easily turned the list upside down and headlined its feature “The Biggest Environmental Culprits of Corporate America.”

Corporations and the Amazon

These days just about every large corporation would have us believe that it is in the vanguard of the fight to reverse global warming. Companies mount expensive ad campaigns to brag about raising their energy efficiency and shrinking their carbon footprint.

Yet a bold article in the latest issue of business-friendly Bloomberg Markets magazine documents how some large U.S.-based transnationals are complicit in a process that does more to exacerbate the climate crisis than anything else: the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

While deforestation is usually blamed on local ranchers and loggers, Bloomberg points the finger at companies such as Alcoa and Cargill, which the magazine charges have used their power to get authorities in Brazil to approve large projects that violate the spirit of the country’s environmental regulations.

Alcoa is constructing a huge bauxite mine that will chew up more than 25,000 acres of virgin jungle in an area, the magazine says, “is supposed to be preserved unharmed forever for local residents.” Bloomberg cites Brazilian prosecutors who have been waging a four-year legal battle against an Alcoa subsidiary that is said to have circumvented the country’s national policies by obtaining a state rather than a federal permit for the project.

Bloomberg also focuses on the widely criticized grain port that Cargill built on the Amazon River. Cargill claims to be discouraging deforestation by the farmers supplying the soybeans that pass through the port, but the Brazilian prosecutors interviewed by Bloomberg expressed skepticism that the effort was having much effect.

Apart from the big on-site projects, Bloomberg looks at major corporations that it says purchase beef and leather from Amazonian ranchers who engage in illegal deforestation. Citing Brazilian export records, the magazine identifies Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Kraft Foods and Carrefour as purchasers of the beef and General Motors, Ford and Mercedes-Benz as purchasers of leather.

The impact of the Amazon cattle ranchers was also the focus of a Greenpeace report published in June. That report put heat on major shoe companies that are using leather produced by those ranchers.

Nike and Timberland responded to the study by pledging to end their use of leather hides from deforested areas in the Amazon basin. Greenpeace is trying to get other shoe companies to follow suit.

Think of the Amazon the next time a company such as Wal-Mart tells us what wonderful things it is doing to address the climate crisis.

Wal-Mart’s (Un)sustainability Index

Wal-Mart has taken the latest in a long series of steps to make itself look good by imposing burdens on its suppliers. The mammoth retailer, which is thriving amid the recession, recently announced plans to require its more than 100,000 suppliers to provide information about their operations that would form the basis of a product sustainability index.

Rating products is a good idea. It’s already being done by various non-profit organizations that bring independence and legitimacy to the process. Wal-Mart, by contrast, brings a lot of negative baggage. In recent years, Wal-Mart has used a purported commitment to environmental responsibility to draw attention away from its abysmal record with regard to labor relations, wage and hour regulations, and employment discrimination laws. It also wants us to forget its scandalous tax avoidance policies and its disastrous impact on small competitors. The idea that a company with a business model based on automobile-dependent customers and exploitative supplier factories on the other side of the globe can be considered sustainable should be dismissed out of hand. Yet Wal-Mart is skilled at greenwashing and is, alas, being taken seriously by many observers who should know better.

On close examination, Wal-Mart’s latest plan is, like many of its previous social responsibility initiatives, rather thin. All the company is doing at first is to ask suppliers to answer 15 questions. Ten of these involve environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, water use, waste generation and raw materials sourcing. The final five questions are listed under the heading of “People and Community: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Production.”

Two of them involve “social compliance.” It is an amazing act of chutzpah for Wal-Mart, which probably keeps more sweatshops in business than any other company, to claim moral authority to ask suppliers about the treatment of workers in their supply chain.

The questions in this category seem to assume that suppliers don’t do their own manufacturing. This is a tacit acknowledgement of how Wal-Mart has forced U.S. manufacturers to shift production offshore, and often to outside contractors. Now Wal-Mart has to ask those companies to be sure they know the location of all the plants making their products and the quality of their output.

The point about quality was one that CEO Mike Duke (photo) emphasized when announcing the rating system. This is also highly disingenuous. For years, Wal-Mart was notorious for pressing suppliers to reduce the quality of their goods to keep down prices. Now the behemoth of Bentonville is suddenly a proponent of products that “are more efficient, that last longer and perform better.” Will Wal-Mart pay its suppliers higher prices to cover the costs of improving quality?

I can’t bring myself to jump on Wal-Mart’s bandwagon. If I want product ratings I will turn not to Mike Duke but rather to someone like Dara O’Rourke, who founded a website called Good Guide that rates consumer products and their producers using independently collected data from social investing firms such as KLD Research and non-profits such as the Environmental Working Group. It uses criteria such as labor rights, cancer risks and reproductive health hazards that are unlikely to ever find their way into the Wal-Mart index.

Good Guide also rates companies, including Wal-Mart, which receives a mediocre score of 5.3 (out of 10), and it reaches that level thanks to its marks on p.r.-related measures such as charitable contributions and some but not all environmental measures. In the category of Consumers it gets a 4.1, Corporate Ethics 3.9, and for Labor and Human Rights 4.1 (which is generous).

Maybe Wal-Mart should focus on improving its own scores before presuming to rate everyone else.

Shell’s Self-Serving “Humanitarian” Gesture

whale One of the advantages for a corporation in resolving a sensitive lawsuit out of court is that it can proclaim innocence and insist it is settling for other reasons. Royal Dutch Shell has done just that in a case brought in connection with the 1995 execution of author Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists who campaigned against the oil company’s operations in the Ogoniland region of Nigeria.

Shell actually was even more brazenly self-serving than the typical company that says it is settling in order to put the case behind it. The Anglo-Dutch transnational insisted that its willingness to pay the plaintiffs US$15.5 million – $5 million of which will go into a trust fund for the Ogoni people – was a “humanitarian gesture.” It was unusual for Shell to allow the amount of the settlement to be disclosed, but it was apparently worth it to draw attention away from the lawsuit’s charges that the company collaborated with the repressive military regime that ruled Nigeria in the 1990s and that put Saro-Wiwa and the others to death after a sham trial. The suit – brought in U.S. federal court under the Alien Tort Claims Act, the Torture Victim Protection Act and racketeering statutes – also accused Shell of being complicit in crimes against humanity, torture, inhumane treatment, arbitrary arrest, wrongful death, assault and battery, and infliction of emotional distress.

It is understandable why the plaintiffs and their lawyers – led by the Center for Constitutional Rights and EarthRights International – would feel a need to settle a case that had dragged on for 13 years and provide some financial assistance to the Ogoni community. Yet it is frustrating to see Shell trying to turn an outrage into an opportunity to burnish its image, even though other Ogoni claims are still pending.

The frustration is compounded by the fact that Shell continues to engage in dubious behavior in other parts of its global operations. For example, the company has a problematic relationship with another undemocratic government as part of its deep involvement in a massive oil and gas project in the Russian Far East. That offshore project, known as Sakhalin II, has been the subject of a great deal of controversy because it threatens the survival of one of the world’s most endangered species of whales – Western Pacific Grays (photo).

Groups such as Pacific Environment, collaborating with Russian activists who formed Sakhalin Environment Watch, have pressured Shell and its partners to adopt stronger environmental protections or abandon the project. Shell’s largest partner is Gazprom, a publicly traded gas monopoly that is controlled by the Russian government, which has used the company to advance Russian foreign policy goals vis-à-vis Eastern Europe by cutting off gas supplies at various times. Shell has acknowledged that it is interested in developing a new Sakhalin III project in collaboration with Gazprom.

Last year, there were reports that Shell had sought to influence the outcome of a purportedly independent environmental audit of Sakhalin II. Previously, Shell gained notoriety for overstating its proven petroleum reserves by 20 percent. The company ended up paying about $150 million to U.S. and British authorities to settle the charges. It did not try to depict that payment as a humanitarian gesture, but it is possible that one day Shell may have to put a positive spin on millions paid to settle claims stemming from the harms caused in Sakhalin.

Note: If you want to keep track of the far-flung operations of U.S.-based transnationals, check out a new tool called Croctail, which provides an easy way to search the names of domestic and foreign subsidiaries that publicly traded companies report in their 10-K filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Croctail is an extension of the Crocodyl wiki of critical corporate profiles sponsored by CorpWatch and other groups (full disclosure: I am a contributor and advisor to Crocodyl).

Bayer Fights Safety Board “Terrorists”

bayerblast Corporations will go to great lengths to avoid close scrutiny of their operations, but Bayer CropScience reached a new height of brazenness in its behavior following a massive explosion (photo) last year at its chemical plant outside Charleston, West Virginia. Company chief executive William Buckner admitted in testimony the other day before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that Bayer managers invoked a 2002 law designed to protect ports from terrorists to justify their initial refusal to share information about the accident with the federal government’s Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.

Apparently, what Bayer did not want the “terrorists” from the board to learn was that the company’s safety procedures were a mess. Video monitoring equipment had been disconnected, and air-safety devices were not operating. What made this disarray more disturbing was that the accident came close to causing the release of a large quantity of methyl isocyanate (MIC), the same pesticide component that killed several thousand people near a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India in 1984. The explosion at the West Virginia plant (which was run by Union Carbide until 1986 and taken over by Bayer in 2001) resulted in two deaths and injuries to half a dozen emergency responders.

Shortly after the accident, Bayer managers dropped the preposterous idea that they did not have to cooperate with the safety board, but they came up with other forms of obstruction. They provided thousands of pages of documents but labeled them “security sensitive” so that they could not be disclosed by the safety board. They also claimed that the plant was under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard, given its use of barges on the Kanawha River, and thus it was up to that agency to decide which documents could be released.

Beyond Buckner’s qualified admissions, the House Energy Committee issued a report charging that “Bayer engaged in a campaign of secrecy by withholding critical information from local, county, and state emergency responders; by restricting the use of information provided to federal investigators; by undermining news outlets and citizen groups concerned about the dangers posed by Bayer’s activities; and by providing inaccurate and misleading information to the public.” Among the company documents obtained by the committee was a “community relations strategy” for dealing with a local activist group and the newspaper that diligently followed the story: “Our goal with People Concerned About MIC should be to marginalize them. Take a similar approach to The Charleston Gazette.”

All this may come as a surprise to consumers who think of Bayer Corporation as a purveyor of aspirin and other benign products such as Aleve, Alka-Seltzer, Flintstones Vitamins and Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. But the company’s ultimate parent, Bayer AG of Germany, has one of the most shameful histories of any major corporation: During the Second World War, it was part of the notorious IG Farben conglomerate that made use of slave labor to serve the Nazi war machine and produce the lethal gas used in the death camps.

What Bayer did in West Virginia does not begin to approach its war crimes during the Nazi era, but it shows that the company still has a lot to learn about corporate ethics.

Note: For more material on Bayer’s checkered environmental record, see the website of the Dusseldorf-based Coalition Against Bayer Dangers. Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward Jr., who has written extensively on the Bayer explosion, also contributes pieces about the accident to the paper’s Sustained Outrage blog.

Not Quite Beyond Petroleum

For the past eight years, the oil giant formerly known as British Petroleum has tried to convince the world that its initials stand for “Beyond Petroleum.” An announcement just issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may suggest that the real meaning of BP is Brazen Polluter.

The EPA revealed that BP Products North America will pay nearly $180 million to settle charges that it has failed to comply with a 2001 consent decree under which it was supposed to implement strict controls on benzene and benzene-tainted waste generated by the company’s vast oil refining complex in Texas City, Texas, located south of Houston. Since the 1920s, benzene has been known to cause cancer.

Among BP’s self-proclaimed corporate values is to be “environmentally responsible with the aspiration of ‘no damage to the environment’” and to ensure that “no one is subject to unnecessary risk while working for the group.” Somehow, that message did not seem to make its way to BP’s operation in Texas City, which has a dismal performance record.

The benzene problem in Texas City was supposed to be addressed as part of the $650 million agreement BP reached in January 2001 with the EPA and the Justice Department covering eight refineries around the country. Yet environmental officials in Texas later found that benzene emissions at the plant remained high. BP refused to accept that finding and tried to stonewall the state, which later imposed a fine of $225,000.

In March 2005 a huge explosion (photo) at the refinery killed 15 workers and injured more than 170. The blast blew a hole in a benzene storage tank, contaminating the air so seriously that safety investigators could not enter the site for a week after the incident.

BP was later cited for egregious safety violations and paid a record fine of $21.4 million. Subsequently, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by former secretary of state James Baker III found that BP had failed to spend enough money on safety and failed to take other steps that could have prevented the disaster in Texas City. Still later, the company paid a $50 million fine as part of a plea agreement on related criminal charges.

In an apparent effort to repair its image, BP has tried to associate itself with positive environmental initiatives. The company was, for instance, one of the primary sponsors of the big Good Jobs/Green Jobs conference held in Washington earlier this month. Yet as long as BP operates dirty facilities such as the Texas City refinery, the company’s sunburst logo, its purported earth-friendly values and its claim of going beyond petroleum will be nothing more than blatant greenwashing.

Wanted: The Big Fish

In its waning days, the Bush Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency wants us to think that it is a serious crime-fighting organization. The agency’s enforcement division recently announced plans to “enlist the public in tracking down fugitives accused of violating environmental laws and evading arrest.” The innovation is a web page called EPA Fugitives, an online version of the wanted posters traditionally displayed in post offices.

There’s nothing wrong with such an initiative, but the two dozen culprits featured on the site are all decidedly small fish. Some are charged with serious offenses such as the dumping of hazardous wastes, while others are accused of less than monumental crimes such as illegally importing automobiles that don’t meet emissions standards or “aiding and abetting false entries into an Oil Record Book” of a ship.

Where is the agency’s zeal for highlighting the environmental crimes of large corporations? It’s been greatly diminished amid a general downplaying of enforcement activity. Last year the Environmental Integrity Project put out a report showing a sharp decline in enforcement efforts during the Bush Administration. “The bad news here is that it now costs less to pollute,” EIP Director Eric Schaeffer said at the time.

This is not to say that the EPA has let large corporations entirely off the hook. In fact, just this week the agency announced a settlement with Exxon Mobil under which the oil giant will pay $6.1 million in civil penalties for violating the terms of a 2005 consent decree concerning air pollution caused by the company’s refineries in Texas, California and Louisiana.

It apparently takes truly brazen actions such as those of Exxon to trigger real action by the EPA against a big company (though a $6 million fine is not much of a hardship for a company currently earning about $5 billion a month). If you look at the archive of the agency’s press releases on enforcement actions, the offending parties are most often small firms and individuals.

Perhaps the Obama Administration’s EPA should consider a new web page of its own: a rogue’s gallery of the large corporations that are doing the most to pollute the environment and exacerbate the climate crisis.

Shell’s Troubled Relationship with the Truth

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is facing accusations that it manipulated a supposedly independent environmental audit of a huge Russian oil and gas project in which it is involved. Nick Mathiason of the British newspaper The Observer reports that he obtained dozens of internal e-mails showing that Shell officials in London sought to influence the conclusions of a review of Sakhalin II being conducted by AEA Technology. The audit was used by financial institutions in making funding decisions about the $22 billion project.

The Observer quotes Doug Norlen of the group Pacific Environment as saying: “Shell stage-managed the whole process. They set the agenda, scheduled meetings and even participated in the editing of sections. I believe this to be a stark and vivid example of manipulation.” The Shell website contains a page on which it touts the favorable findings of the AEA report.

Pacific Environment, a non-profit advocacy organization based in San Francisco, has done pioneering environmental work on the Russian Far East and Siberia, collaborating with Russian activists who formed Sakhalin Environment Watch. The groups have been highly critical of the offshore Sakhalin II project because it threatens the survival of the world’s most endangered species of whales—Western Pacific Grays (photo). The campaign has pressured Shell and its partners to adopt stronger environmental protections or abandon the project.

The campaign became more complicated in late 2006, when Shell was forced by Russia to sell half of its holdings in the project at a bargain-basement price to Gazprom, which is publicly traded but controlled by the Russian government. This gave Gazprom a majority stake of 55 percent, with Shell’s interest reduced to 27.5 percent. The holdings of the other partners, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, were also slashed.

In its diminished position, Shell was even more vulnerable to attacks in the Russian and foreign press in mid-2007 after it was revealed that David Greer, the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin II, had sent out a motivational memo to his staff containing unattributed passages taken from a speech made by U.S. General George S. Patton on the eve of D-Day in 1944. Amid the ensuing furor over plagiarism, Greer resigned.

Shell’s integrity problems are not limited to Sakhalin II. In January 2004 the company admitted that had overstated its proven petroleum reserves by 20 percent. It later came out that that top executives at the company knew of the situation two years before it was publicly disclosed. Shell ended up paying penalties of about $150 million to U.S. and British authorities for the misreporting.

In his Observer article, Mathiason notes that environmental campaigners are worried that Shell’s behavior with the Sakhalin II report could be repeated in audits involving other projects such as its oil drilling leases in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. Given the company’s troubled relationship with the truth, that concern is quite legitimate.

Giant Mining Firm’s Social Responsibility Claims: Rhetoric or Reality?

The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to slash the damage award in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case and the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens on corruption charges are not the only controversies roiling Alaska these days. The Last Frontier is also witnessing a dispute over a proposal to open a giant copper and gold mine by Bristol Bay, the headwaters of the world’s largest wild sockeye salmon fishery. Given the popularity of salmon among the health-conscious , even non-Alaskans may want to pay attention to the issue.

The Pebble mine project has been developed by Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Ltd., but the real work would be carried out by its joint venture partner Anglo American PLC, one of the world’s largest mining companies. Concerned about the project and unfamiliar with Anglo American, two Alaska organizations—the Renewable Resources Coalition and Nunamta Aulukestai (Caretakers of the Land)—commissioned a background report on the company, which has just been released and is available for download on a website called Eye on Pebble Mine (or at this direct PDF link). I wrote the report as a freelance project.

Anglo American—which is best known as the company that long dominated gold mining in apartheid South Africa as well as diamond mining/marketing through its affiliate DeBeers—has assured Alaskans it will take care to protect the environment and otherwise act responsibly in the course of constructing and operating the Pebble mine. The purpose of the report is to put that promise in the context of the company’s track record in mining operations elsewhere in the world.

The report concludes that Alaskans have reason to be concerned about Anglo American. Reviewing the company’s own worldwide operations and those of its spinoff AngloGold in the sectors most relevant to the Pebble project—gold, base metals and platinum—the report find a troubling series of problems in three areas: adverse environmental impacts, allegations of human rights abuses and a high level of workplace accidents and fatalities.

The environmental problems include numerous spills and accidental discharges at Anglo American’s platinum operations in South Africa and AngloGold’s mines in Ghana. Waterway degradation occurred at Anglo American’s Lisheen lead and zinc mine in Ireland, while children living near the company’s Black Mountain zinc/lead/copper mine in South Africa were found to be struggling in school because of elevated levels of lead in their blood.

The main human rights controversies have taken place in Ghana, where subsistence farmers have been displaced by AngloGold’s operations and have not been given new land, and in the Limpopo area of South Africa, where villagers were similarly displaced by Anglo American’s platinum operations.

High levels of fatalities in the mines of Anglo American and AngloGold—more than 200 in the last five years—have become a major scandal in South Africa, where miners staged a national strike over the issue late last year.

Overall, the report finds that Anglo American’s claims of social responsibility appear to be more rhetoric than reality. Salmon eaters beware.