Titan’s Trouble With the Truth

When Marino Papazoglou, Titan Cement’s director of business development, told us at our very first meeting that his plant would emit no hydrochloric acid (they will actually emit 62,000 pounds); no benzene (they will emit nearly 7,000 pounds of this carcinogen), and their mercury emissions will be somewhere between 10 and 100 pounds annually (it will be 263 pounds), his credibility, and that of his company, became immediately suspect. Since then, Mr. Papazoglou and his team of PR consultants have waged a concerted spin campaign to downplay or outright deny the impacts of what would be the fourth largest cement plant in the nation, at times going so far as to deny facts contained in their own air permit application to the state. It seems they say one thing to the public, and quite another to those that would regulate them. [For a full list, check out Ten Titanic Tales by Titan America on this site.]

The latest pile of misinformation came from their first public “workshop,” held last week at Cape Fear Community College’s north campus. While the public brought hard questions for Titan’s blue-shirted “experts” and public affairs professionals, Titan brought cookies and jars of rocks (“This is limestone. This is cement….”) as if they were performing a sixth-grade science experiment. But they brought precious little in the way of real answers.

At the wetlands table, for example, their expert tried to tell a group that included Commissioner Ted Davis, state senate candidate Michael Lee, and a dozen other concerned citizens, that the recent comments by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describing the 600 acres of wetlands Titan plans to destroy as “Aquatic Resources of National Importance,” and “unmitigable” were merely the fringe of woods along the river and Island Creek. When someone produced the actual document and showed him the exact reference to the total wetlands, he stumbled, backtracked, and was whisked away in mid-sentence by one of Titan’s PR minions. This occurred numerous times during the night as their scripted PR lines failed to meet muster.

Rick Pleus, their hired toxicologist who is supposed to allay our fears about mercury emissions, was exceptionally ill-informed. He had no idea how many children attended school near the proposed plant (he asked us to send him the data) nor was he aware of the recent groundbreaking study by the University of Texas Health Science Center showing a correlation between autism rates and distance from industrial sources of mercury pollution (he asked us to send him that link as well).  It appeared Dr. Pleus was just setting up the parameters of his study, in which he plans to ask the public questions about their mercury concerns and address them with existing data. He was not planning on doing any sampling of mercury contamination or mercury levels in fish.

According to Titan’s PR chief Kate McClain,  Dr. Pleus and his company Intertox have an “indisputable reputation for providing honest health risk assessments on an international level.”

In fact, Dr. Pleus and Intertox have an indisputable reputation as scientific shills for polluting industries, in particular the makers of perchlorate, the toxic chemical in rocket fuel that has contaminated groundwater in California and 34 other states. In 2005 they were caught rewriting a news report of one of their studies in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, so that it heavily favored the perchlorate industry—conveniently omitting the fact that the study (and Intertox) were funded by the perchlorate industry. The Intertox study was later debunked by the EPA and state agencies for using too small a sample size to make their sweeping conclusions about the safety of the pollutant in public drinking water supplies. Pleus and Intertox were also the subject of a Wall Street Journal article about their role in setting up a supposed “independent” scientific conference on perchlorate at the University of Nebraska that heavily favored their corporate sponsors while conveniently omitting those with dissenting views from the EPA.

You can read these and many other sad tales of science for sale simply by Googling Intertox and perchlorate.

One of my favorite lines from Titan’s experts came from Andrew Brod, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNC-Greensboro, who was manning the “Economic Impact” station.  When someone asked him, wasn’t it true that his rosy projections of millions in ancillary economic benefits only applied to high-tech industries, he replied: “The cement industry is high tech! There’s a lot of science in making cement.” The questioner, a former pharmaceutical employee, was not convinced.

Tidbits of truth did emerge from Titan’s workshop. Dr. Brod admitted that the IMPLAN model he used was a “quick and dirty” program anyone could buy for around $450 that only had two inputs provided by the industry—the number of employees and the average salary—which Titan has promised to be a whopping $75,000 for its cement plant workers. He also admitted that the 160  people Titan has promised to employ is “small change,” for our area, representing less than 0.002 percent of New Hanover County’s workforce.

Perhaps one of the most enlightening moments was when we asked one of the senior Greek Titan officials about the pilot program for activated carbon injection for mercury reduction that Marino Papazoglou told us Titan was conducting in Athens, and would surely implement if it was found to work. “There is no such pilot program,” said the official bluntly. “Who told you that?”

Titan’s PR team even went so far as to try to expel a local journalist covering the public event because they didn’t like his previous article on the company, nor would they allow local journalists to directly question all of their supposed experts. Proof, if any more were needed, that Titan intends to continue to duck the hard questions and keep the public in the dark.

But wait, it gets better. The day after the workshop, Titan’s new PR person, Kirsty Piper, pushed out a gleeful press release stating that the Castle Hayne Steering Committee had voted 7 to 1 in favor of the Titan plant. The only problem was, the Castle Hayne Steering Committee, which has closer to 20 members, never voted on Titan. Nor did they publicly endorse or release a statement of support for Titan. Piper was forced to release an embarrassing retraction–which must have been difficult to type with her foot so firmly wedged in her mouth.

Public officials who still seem to be wondering about who or what to believe should take note. It seems pretty apparent that Titan and their hired minions will say anything they think they need to say to get their plant approved…whether it’s true or not.