Ira Rennert, Doe Run and Renco Group

Ira Rennert, the billionaire who owns a 95 percent stake in the Renco Group, is currently the 144th richest man in the world. The Renco Group’s principal subsidiaries are the only primary magnesium producer in the United States, US Magnesium Corp. (MagCorp), and the largest primary lead producer in the western world, Doe Run Resources Corporation.

The La Oroya Metallurgical Complex is not the only Doe Run facility known for pollution problems. In 1996 MagCorp was named the number one polluting industrial facility in the United States by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As recently as April 2010, the EPA said that investigations on the company’s Utah site found “high levels of environmental contamination …. [including] arsenic, chromium, mercury, copper, and zinc; acidic waste water; chlorinated organics; polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); dioxins/furans, hexachlorobenzene (HCB); and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).” Doe Run has frequently been cited by the EPA for exceeding legal emission limits, as well as polluting roads and soils around its facilities in Herculaneum, Missouri. In February 2002, health officials in Missouri found that 56 percent of children living near the Doe Run smelter had high blood-lead levels. An October 2009 EPA report says that soil on one-third of properties situated within a mile of the company’s lead smelter contain lead at levels exceeding the legal threshold for mandatory removal and replacement. An EPA administrator said that Doe Run’s emission reduction efforts there “clearly fall short of what was necessary.”

While the Renco Group’s facilities have poisoned people and the environment in both the United States and Peru, Rennert has become one of the richest men in the world. Rennert was awarded the Awful Truth Man of Year Award in 1999 by filmmaker Michael Moore, based on the 1996 EPA MagCorp report, as well as a second EPA report from the same year which lists Renco Group as the worst polluting parent company.