The company, which has since been renamed Radius Recycling, and two employees were later charged with up to 10 separate environmental felonies and misdemeanors.
The charges include felony violations of the state’s health and safety code between 2021 and 2023, as well as conspiracy to destroy evidence, reckless handling of hazardous waste and negligently emitting air contaminants. The company and both employees pleaded not guilty in December.
Radius Recycling did not respond to requests for comment from Public Health Watch, but the company has defended its business and the metal shredding industry as a way to produce steel — a construction staple — with a small or neutral carbon footprint that can help mitigate climate change and meet regulatory requirements for greener building.
Then-District Attorney Pamela Price called the criminal charges “historic.”
“We believe Radius has often shrugged off the regulations when it was convenient to them, treating minor administrative penalties and fines as the cost of doing business,” Price said at the time the indictment was handed down.
Regulators, it appears, also fell down on the job.
6231 Schnitzer Steel workers use cranes to pull metal out of the smoky mound after a fire started deep in a pile of scrap on Aug. 9, 2023. (Courtesy Oakland Fire Department)
Oversight of the metal shredding industry has repeatedly faltered. Over the years, the state has granted exemptions from a key rule, missed a deadline for drafting new regulations and avoided enforcement of existing laws, either through lack of resources or lack of effort.
Along the way, decades of poorly coordinated efforts among a host of public agencies have enabled — and in some cases exacerbated — problems across the industry, Public Health Watch learned.
“There’s multiple agencies in charge of making sure industry complies with relevant laws, but these agencies have failed to actually do the job of enforcing those laws,” said Karen Chen, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of stricter enforcement.
“In the meantime, real people suffer irreversible health harms while \[the state Department of Toxic Substances Control\] waits to truly do its job and enforce the hazardous waste control law,” Chen said. “In turn, metal shredders get to skirt regulations in order to make a buck.”