Vintage Boeing
A recent run-in with Metro exemplifies what many observers call Boeing's cavalier approach of dealing with regulators, its attempts to divert attention away from its environmental shortcomings and its desire to control the flow of public information. All these factors generated a familiar by-product - scant media coverage of a serious Boeing environmental snafu.

Last summer, Boeing's Auburn plant discharged nearly 1,400 pounds of chromium - a carcinogenic heavy metal that can kill marine wildlife - into one of Metro's sanitary sewage systems. Boeing uses chromium to help make parts corrosion-resistant. Unbeknownst to Metro, the chromium went to the agency's sewage treatment plant in Renton, where most of it found its way into truckloads of "biosolids" - treated solid waste primarily used to fertilize forest and farm lands. Much of it winds up in the Olympic National Forest.

Why didn't Boeing know about the discharge? Because the pipe that discharged the chromium was located downstream of a contamination measuring device at the Auburn plant, Metro officials said.

"We hope there are no more of these pipes," said Elsie Hulsizer, Metro's industrial waste manager. "We assume that they don't have any more."

Boeing said the discharge was "inadvertent." But the heretofore unreported history of the offending pipe raises some disturbing questions.

Before the pipe was installed, Boeing had been discharging partially treated wastewater directly into a waterway near the Auburn plant. The discharges, however, failed to meet state standards. In 1988, Boeing applied to Metro for a permit allowing it to pour the waste into the Metro sewer system.

The pipe was installed that year but Boeing didn't submit required plans for the pipe until two years later, so Metro had no idea that discharges were not being monitored by the company.

Boeing's Kirk Thomson told the Free Press that the pipe - which has since been removed - was only used about once a year, and only for maintenance purposes. The discharge, however, occurred over a two-month period, from May 25 to July 23 of last year.

As Metro continues to look at why the pipe was installed the way it was, the agency says that Boeing is aggressively appealing its record $198,000 fine. Metro, sensing the pressure of publicity-sensitive Boeing officials, was cautious not to discuss details of the negotiations with the company. A hearing before Metro's Industrial Waste Board of Review is scheduled for April 8.

Boeing officials negotiating with Metro in hopes of reducing the fine exhibited a familiar behavior.

"The typical Boeing meeting goes like this," Hulsizer said. "They'll bring in a lot of people spending the first half of the meeting saying what a wonderful job they're doing to follow environmental regulations. They'll in fact brag about all the things they're doing that they don't have to do. They say they're good corporate citizens working to protect the environment."

Media coverage of the record fine was minimal. Originally reported in the Valley Daily News , the story was picked up by the Associated Press and run in the Seattle Times , which did none of their own reporting on the story. Despite a the company's history of wastewater violations, a Boeing spokesperson was quoted at the top of the AP story as saying, "Boeing prides itself on having a very good working relationship with Metro. (See related stories on media coverage and Boeing's environmental fines.)

More Vintage Boeing
Another case of what has become known as classic Boeing behavior is the cleanup of the city of Seattle's Midway landfill. Closed in October 1983 and declared a federal Superfund site last fall, the landfill, located in Kent, was a frequent recipient of hazardous sludge from Boeing's spray-paint booths, said Jim Tupper, a Seattle city attorney. Though records are sketchy, Tupper said it is believed that Boeing used the landfill throughout its 17-year lifespan.

Despite the fact that Boeing dumped the sludge at the landfill, the company doesn't want to pay any cleanup costs, Tupper said, forcing the city into an expensive federal lawsuit to force Boeing to ante up. The city is trying to recoup some of the $36 million it spent on the Superfund cleanup project. (It has spent a total of $64 million to close and clean the landfill.) Some estimates have put Boeing's overall contribution to the landfill at 10 percent.

In the eyes of the federal Superfund program, whether or not Boeing's dumping was legal is irrelevant. If a company contributed to the contamination of a Superfund site, it can be held liable for cleanup, Tupper said.

"The paint sludge is part of the whole soup of contamination at the landfill," Tupper said. "I have no idea what (Boeing's) strategy is. ut I don't anticipate any problem obtaining a judgment against Boeing for liability. The real question is how much of the costs Boeing should pay."

Boeing has a policy of not discussing pending lawsuits. The lengthy deposition-taking process will begin this spring, though the case is not expected to be heard until February 1995.

The Boeing Method
As it has become clear in its trade battles with Europe's Airbus conglomerate, Boeing's world-class confidence has been one of the key components to its ability to lead the world in commercial airplane production. And it's been that same confidence that has established Boeing's hammerlock on dissent and opposition closer to home.

Observers say that only a company as brash as Boeing could pull off the public-relations and political triumphs that Boeing has. The long arm of Boeing can be felt throughout many of the region's institutions.

"They are the octopus that has wrapped its legs around Puget Sound," said Ortman of Friends of the Earth.

Take the Church Council of Greater Seattle. One of the most active church organizations in the country in anti-war, social service and other progressive movements, the Church Council was stopped cold when it turned its attention to Boeing's environmental record.

The Rev. William Cate, the council's former leader, remembers the opposition he faced.

"It's like hitting your head against a stone wall," said Cate, who now lives in Bellevue. "Boeing people are all over the place. You can't go any place without running into them. It makes it very difficult."

Cate said the Boeing backlash has been so strong that it extends into his place of worship, saying that he and his family have been "treated very badly" at the First United Methodist Church of Bellevue.

Ortman said he approached Cate several years ago about concentrating on some of Boeing's environmental problems. He got nowhere.

"(The church council) admitted that Boeing carries too much clout," Ortman remembered. "There are too many Boeing executives sitting on church boards.

"I was taken aback," he said. "(The council) has been willing to take on anybody and everybody, and they folded their tent when Boeing came up. But the environmental community hasn't been much better."

Indeed, a host of powerful forces - some more overt than others - have conspired to debilitate one of the most robust environmental movements in the country.

One such inconspicuous though disarming force originates from front-line Boeing officials, who are known for their ability to accentuate the company's environmental positives, while playing down the negatives. Statements from boastful Boeing officials not only shape the opinions of the reading and listening public, observers say, they even go as far as to mold the views of some environmental advocacy groups.

In the P.R. business, it's known as "greenwashing" - brainwashing with an environmental spin. "A lot of what they do is greenwashing, very much so," said Moses of the Washington Toxics Coalition.

One such organization effectively greenwashed by Boeing is the Clean Air Coalition, which is affiliated with the American Lung Association of Washington. Janet Chalupnic, a coalition co-director, initially told a Free Press reporter, "I think Boeing has been good on air-quality issues. I think they have tried to be somewhat forward looking."

When asked for an example, Chalupnic could offer no specific areas in which Boeing is reducing its air pollution. She said that her impression of Boeing has been influenced by company officials themselves.

"I suppose I'm partly basing this on comments that (Boeing environmental affairs director Kirk Thomson) has made," she said, adding that she has never asked him "which toxics are you reducing."

How does this happen? "People are too scared that Boing is going to leave," Moses speculates. "It's easier to think of Boeing as having turned around environmentally. It's easier to take Boeing's word for it. They essentially hold the cards."

This dynamic, coupled with Boeing's sheer size and complexity, has poisoned otherwise fertile ground for environmentalists seeking to pressure Boeing to environmentally enhance some of its operations.

"They're so big that it would take an enormous amount of resources to (study the company) right," said the WTC's Moses. "And it might not be worth it because of the power they have."

Also working in Boeing's favor, some observers say, is its uniqueness - that much more is known about ways to clean up, for example, the decentralized pulp and paper industry than the aerospace industry, which just a few companies dominate.

Further, environmentalists agree, Boeing's waste products are more obscure and not as readily sensed as the pollution from pulp and paper mills.

"They're not a high-profile polluter," said Kathy Fletcher, executive director of People for Puget Sound. "They don't do logging. They're not a pulp mill. They don't have any smokestacks. With Boeing, there are more subtle pollution issues. It's hard for people to get a handle on them."

Fletcher and others also say that environmental advocates spend so much of their time working on forestry and other land-use issues that they couldn't possibly take on a project such as Boeing.

'Is Boeing Worth It?'
The battle between economic growth and ecological sensitivity is as old as the Industrial Revolution. Though ecological consciousness is on the rise, few industrial companies see eye-to-eye with government regulators and environmentalists when it comes to protecting the environment. One person's pollution is another person's dollar sign.

The mere size and importance of Boeing - along with the fact that it is the state's second-worst overall polluter (behind Weyerhaeuser) and the champion air polluter - work together to elevate this argument to super-jet proportions.

With even the White House leaping onto the environmental bandwagon, the same questions being posed to polluting industries nationwide recently have started to dog Boeing.

At what point is the balance between economic stimulation and environmental protection out of whack?

Are decades-old industries causing long-term, even irreversible ecological degradation?

Are some industries, simply by virtue of their waste-production, outdated?

No longer protected by Western Washington's absolute dependence on it, Boeing is more vulnerable than ever to these questions. Boeing even is starting to hear a question that as recently as 10 years ago was unaskable: "Does the company's economic importance outweigh the environmental and public health damage and its resulting costs?"

"My guess is that the public would say that it's worth it," said Moses of the Toxics Coalition. "But to put a figure on all of the social and other costs that are a direct consequence of Boeing making airplanes in this state and weigh that with the economic benefit, I don't know what the answer would be. If you were to do a real cost-benefit analysis, we would get a more honest indication of whether it's worth it to have Boeing in the community."

Moses touched on a point that just recently has become a big part of environmentalists' arguments against or in favor of various policies: What is the complete price to society - including health and environmental costs - of a certain company's business? Observers say they're hampered by the lack of numbers to plug into the formula, including numbers that could come from Boeing.

"The one thing that you can say is that we don't know, and we don't have a good enough way of measuring the health effects that occur in the state," said Cellarius of the Sierra Club. "I couldn't say for sure whether Boeing has had an impact on us ... We need a better program of monitoring the health effects of our industries, and the industries need to tell us more."

Bottom-Line Environmentalism
Sensing the economic gains to be reaped by reducing pollution, Boeing in 1986 merged all waste-reduction efforts into an Office of Environmental Affairs. Since that time, the company's commitment to reducing waste has grown to a $13-$20 million-a-year operation, with more than 65 staffers working on 100-200 pollution-prevention projects.

Boeing, in the summer of 1990, also joined the Environmental Protection Agency's so-called "33/50" program, in which companies voluntarily agree to cut their emission of 17 dangerous chemicals by a third by 1993, and in half by 1996 as compared to their 1988 levels. The 17 chemicals - including carcinogens, toxic heavy metals and ozone-depleters - are part of a list of 313 harmful pollutants that US industries are required to report to the EPA every November.

(Boeing only agreed to meet the 50 percent cut by 1996, not the 33 percent goal by 1993.)

To Boeing's credit, it has succeeded in reducing its emission of the 313 chemicals and the 17 "33/50" chemicals, according to EPA records obtained by the Free Press that will be made public this summer. By the end of 1991, Boeing had cut its emission of the "33/50" chemicals by about 10 percent - from 5.14 million pounds in 1988 to 4.61 million pounds in 1991. Overall, Boeing's reported emissions of the 313 chemicals was down from 7.28 million pounds in 1990 to 6.26 million in 1991 - a 14 percent drop. Before 1990, the total had grown steadily.

Boeing still accounts for about 10 percent of all toxic pollution released in the state - with roughly two-thirds of it coming from air emissions.

When asked to characterize the airplane-building process, Thomson said, "It's remarkably clean."

Among Boeing's discharges are carcinogens, stratospheric ozone depleters, greenhouse gases, street-level smog components and a collection of chemicals that can cause organ damage, birth and reproductive defects and immune system problems, all the way down to eye and lung irritation, dizziness, headaches, fatigue, memory loss and vomiting. Some of the toxins are soluble in animal fat and increase in concentration as they are handed up the food chain, while others nestle in water and sediments and stay there for years.

A vast majority of the vapors are released during the cleaning, treating and painting of airplane parts; up to 4 million parts can go into the making of one plane.

"It's taken us years to come up with a new way to paint an airplane, to vapor degrease, to anodize parts (for corrosion resistance)," said Boeing's Thomson. "But we are taking the high road. We are looking for all opportunities to reduce pollution."

Critics complain, however, that the 33/50 program is voluntary, and that the 33 and 50 percent reductions are nationwide targets - that is, individual companies like Boeing don't necessarily have to meet the goals.

It's a similar knock on Boeing's state-required pollution prevention plans. Due largely in part to Boeing lobbyists, the recently approved state law mandating the plans do not require companies to actually follow them.

"The fact that Boeing is doing something is a very good sign. But a lot of it is P.R.," said the WTC's Moses. "It's frustrating because Boeing has the resources, the time and the expertise to really be doing the right things for the right reasons."

Moses agreed that much of what Boeing is doing in the area of waste reduction is driven by economics.

"I don't think Boeing would have invested the millions of dollars it has if pollution prevention didn't make sense from an economic standpoint," she said. "They've obviously looked at it and think of it as something they need to do to stay competitive."

'Green' Light to Leave?
Though Boeing has talked about the possibility of building a future expansion elsewhere in terms of the state's economic and land-use policies, Olympia's environmental regulations aren't far behind on the list of determining factors.

Thomson, who on occasion gets personally involved in lobbying legislators and negotiating with regulators, hinted at what might be a crossroads for lawmakers who shape the state's environmental policies.

"We are looking for a decade where we don't have a command-and-control situation," Thomson said, suggesting instead voluntary environmental programs.

"If someone says, 'Here's where we want to go,' the best thing to do for Boeing is not to tell us how to get there. Let us figure out how to get there."

Boeing actively is pushing for reforms of the Washington's Growth Management Act, State Environmental Protection Act and other laws that company officials view as impediments to their expansion plans.

"We see a lot of overlap," Thomson said in not-so-veiled language. "We'd like to reduce that overlap and eliminate it, and we hope that the Legislature and governor take the opportunity to make those improvements."

Environmentalists and other advocates argue that the GMA and SEPA were created with different goals in mind - GMA primarily a land-use policy and SEPA mainly spelling out reviews of a development's likely environmental impact.

More broadly, Boeing watchers construe the company's professed unhappiness with the condition of the state's economic and environmental policies as a scheme to further water down Washington's regulations, which political experts have said lag behind those of neighboring Oregon.

While an effective strategy for Boeing, its linking of economic growth to the easing of environmental policies has come under criticism.

"I'm really disturbed by it," said one observer who asked not to be identified. "They've really tried to manipulate people and abuse their position. I find it absolutely appalling."

(Others speculate that Boeing already has decided to build its new super-jet plant outside of Western Washington, and that Boeing President Frank Shrontz's recent threats to leave unless state regulations are loosened are nothing more than political gamesmanship.)

In one way, Boeing may be in a perfect position. On the verge of laying off 19,000 Western Washington workers by 1994, Boeing knows that Washington already has the sixth-highest unemployment rate of any state in the country. It also knows about the growing backlash against the state's recent environmental reforms. And, it knows that President Clinton's recent visit and his pledges to pump up the US aerospace industry with possible subsidies have inspired visions of a rejuvenated Boeing.

What better conditions to exploit in hopes of enhancing its own expansion plans?

Said a long-time Boeing watcher who asked not to be identified, "Whenever there is a Boeing decline, people say there is a bad business climate or that we are not doing enough for Boeing. The way to deal with the issue is not to give breaks wherever they want. We don't want to be and look like Wichita. I think Seattle would be a much different place to live."

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Contents on this page were published in the April, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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