How I Discovered Chemetco

By Alistair Siddons.

DECEMBER 1988: MARGARET THATCHER was in her final term interest rates were at 13% and Cliff Richard was in the charts with ‘Mistletoe and Wine.’ 

This was the high-water mark of the yuppy era.  Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ - a brash, fur-coated opportunist, had become a British comic icon for the period.

The headline of the ad that caught my attention on the Tube one night was just nine words long: ‘Commodities company seeks fluent French speaker for international opportunity. ’

I knew nothing about commodities, except what I’d seen in Trading Places (1983) the feel-good movie with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. I’d watched it several times, so I knew that fresh concentrated orange juice and pork bellies were commodities.

And I had read in the press about a notorious city company called DPR futures. It sold futures and options on commodities – until then, sophisticated risk-management instruments for corporations – to private individuals, some of whom lost their life savings.

DPR later became the subject of an investigation by the recently-formed Securities and Investments Board (renamed the Financial Services Authority in 1997.)

So I had two reference points. One was a Hollywood movie; the other, a real story about greed, the monetisation of ignorance and the under-regulation of London’s investment markets. Neither seemed particularly relevant to my international commodities opportunity. Still, I had the necessary fluency in French.  I went ahead and applied.

THE DAY AFTER THE CLAPHAM RAIL DISASTER that was to kill 35 people, I stepped through the metal door of a south London warehouse. Heaps of dusty scrap were piled up untidily across the floor.

A  bank of railway sleepers had been built up between vertically arranged roof support joists, protecting the flimsy breeze-block walls against collisions and against the sharp metallic protrusions that jutted out everywhere. 

It was a completely alien environment.  I couldn't believe this world had been hidden from me.

I was wearing a charcoal grey suit and a double-cuffed shirt and I couldn't have looked more out of place. 

I peered down at my pair of black Oxfords, which crunched as a walked. I already had little bits of swarf embedded in the soles.

A Bobcat (2) whined deafeningly as it scooped up bucketsful of metal, charged up a ramp at the back of a shipping container and reversed down again.

A bearded man in early middle-age came out of a Portakabin to greet me. He shook my hand and looked contemptuously at my suit. ‘The interviews are upstairs,’ he shouted in a midlands accent. The Bobcat moved closer. ‘Upstairs!’

Upstairs, a Belgian called Peter, an American called Mike and a Brit named Steve were waiting for me.

Mike - the most senior - picked up the glass reservoir from a percolator in the corner, swilled it round the tidemark a few times and poured me a polystyrene cup of the stuff. This was  a long time before 'double E to flee.'

Mike showed me round the office. Now I'm no expert, but the office accommodation seemed to be playing fast and loose with building regulations. 

It was modelled on a Portakabin design, built into one corner of the warehouse and took a tenth of the total area.

Very little light came into the high windows of the warehouse, but unpleasantly little came into the low-ceilinged office area (3).

Up a narrow flight of stairs, a map of the United States and Canada dominated one wall.  Criss-crossing rail and freight delivery routes covered the map. Three analogue clocks displayed the time in places I’d never heard of: HARTFORD, BILBAO and BEERSE.

Two guys in collegiate casuals were hunched over their Macs. ‘Hey, these are the bean counters,’ joked Mike. The accountants, both apparently MBA’s from ivy-league business schools, looked down and carried on number-crunching. They had a lot of beans to count.

Mike interviewed me in English, Peter in French. He explained that the successful candidate for my role would be trained in Belgium and the UK, and then sent to the USA to initiate a project for a North American copper refinery, specifically ‘to handle the Quebec and Toronto area’ (4).

I nodded, as if already used to doing high-value transatlantic deals.

Back on the warehouse floor, Mike signalled ‘cut’ to the Bobcat driver. The engine stopped. ‘See that?’ said Mike, pointing to a grungy stack of pointed metallic shapes, ‘how much is that worth?’ I just had no idea. Mike laughed. ‘That pile is worth $100,000.

I swallowed the remainder of my coffee, which displaced the metallic coating on my tongue and mouth. When Mike asked me if I wanted the job, I took it.

And that moment was the start of the journey that was shortly to take me to Chemetco.  I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

Notes:

(1) Bobcat: small, high-torque, high-mobility industrial loader with tank-style controls. Can turn on the spot.  The copper refinery used models configured with a front bucket with a capacity of about a tonne, to load freight containers. Bobcat is a trade-name but also a generic description.

(2) Another firm, LHW Futures, was also investigated for its appalling retail commodities trading ethics.  See, for example:

 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1247941,00.html

(3) Initially I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the accommodation or its compliance with building regulations.

Later on, when I had to live with our quirky accommodation arrangements, I argued that the nature of this operation made it vital for the massive warehouse to be instantly accessible from the office. 

However, since there was no office accommodation contiguous with the warehouse, there was no alternative for the company but to stick with this arrangement.  I was following an implicit corporate argument without persuasion.

(4) 'Quebec and Toronto area.'  A massive geographical area, but this was how the company referred to my region. It was a factually accurate description, even if it does make the area sound like a small town.

© Alistair Siddons, 2006

Chemetco: My Training. December 1988

By Alistair Siddons.

MY INITIAL TRAINING was a week-long international seminar with new and seasoned employees from a copper refinery in Belgium, Metallo Chimique.

There was a Scottish psychology graduate named Rick (1). There were freshers from Paris, greenhorns from Frankfurt and new-starters from Ercosa.  Mick and some other Americans were among those there in a leadership role. 

During that week, we were exposed to everything that needed to be learned about copper refining and the acquisition of ‘secondary’ (scrap) copper.  In-between presentations, the Europeans  smoked furiously.

Nobody could understand how it was possible to have got by for so long without knowing what we now knew.

We became evangelists for copper. We also learnt about tin, because – uniquely in Europe – our refinery was able to refine tin as well as copper scrap.

As we were deployed back to our offices, we felt a taste of American working culture. Our boss, Mike, had recently left Chicago to spearhead the setting-up of what we learnt was a new operation, first in London and then across Britain, and he was hell-bent on making a success of it.

The model for this operation – a warehouse with its own commercial offices and buyers attached- came straight from a copper refinery in the United States, Chemetco. Mike and his compatriots were seconded from there.

We started work in earnest at eight, and were expected to be in at least ten minutes before that.  If we arrived at 0800 (as I often did) at best Mike would disapprovingly say: 'Bankers' hours?'  

I was living at the opposite end of London, one stop before the last station on the Piccadilly line. 

I was so inspired by this opportunity that I'd agreed to take the job, even though it meant leaving the house at 05.40 at the latest every morning and travelling for about five hours a day.

FIRST THING EACH MORNING, Mike worked out a price per metric tonne for various grades of copper. The list of grades was huge, but we were routinely interested in about ten of them.

Our prices were based on the underlying price of the 3-month futures contract for copper, as quoted on the London Metal Exchange.

From the traded copper futures price, the Belgian refinery we were supplying could work out how much to pay for its ‘spot’ consumption – that is, copper scrap that it hadn’t yet accounted for when it hedged its annual output.

Mike took the LME quotation and for each grade in turn, subtracted a little-varying amount that included shipping, operations costs and refining losses  - and left the refinery with a margin.

On our computer monitors, in lurid green characters, we could see the refinery’s operating margin for any contract we created. It was expressed in several working currencies including cents per pound (US cents per lb in weight) or Belgian Franks (BEF) per kilogramme.

This fusion of currencies and imperial and metric measurements was something I rapidly became used to. When I went through the door of the warehouse and logged onto the computer,  I could pull up physical evidence of my link to a huge international operation. 

That's how I'd transcend my immediate environment, with its noise and dust and flourescent glare.

Once we had our prices, we phoned suppliers.  It was ditch-digging work, but Rick and I could both see beyond it, each for our reasons.  I was going to America, and Rick had his own plans. 

Mike had a working list, but one of our first tasks was to augment the supplier database.  After office hours, we would manually enter the contact details of merchants using the Yellow Pages and business directories.

The following day, we phoned and screened them, categorising them by size, inventory and potential value to us. ‘We’re looking for rads today,’ we’d say. Or: ‘we’re looking for a hundred tonnes of no. 2 wire.’  Soon, that's how it was with 'a hundred tonnes.'  Just something very easy to say.

Our suppliers were scrap copper merchants and dealers of all sizes, and there were over five-hundred bona-fide businesses in London alone in the late 1980s.

When we got word that the refinery yard in Belgium was looking a bit bare, we could ‘push’ the price by quoting an extra £20 per tonne, and exceptionally, £30 per tonne more. Some grades were worth about £600 per tonne at the time; others, closer to £1,500 per tonne.

I didn’t know it at the time, but giving prices systematically and proactively like this was an aggressive tactic. We were playing fast and loose with the British secondary copper industry, which had been doing things a certain way for decades.

It wasn’t just that we were quoting keen prices. To make things worse, we were offering cheque payment-on-delivery-service. This really improved the cash-flow of our suppliers’ businesses and needled the competition intensely.

Our brief was to stay away from the top layer of the market, the very large merchants - we were coached endlessly about who these were - in order to eat their lunch.

WE TOOK TO THE ROAD. Rick went to suppliers in  south and west London,  while I visited those in the north and east.  Now I had my own pair of rigger boots with protective steel toecaps and a  hi-visibility industrial jacket, but the rottweilers and dobermanns of the smaller yards still gave me a hard time. 

And my car was almost crushed by a speeding  forklift truck at a yard on the Essex-London border. 

After the dogs, I had to get past the heavies - the drivers and warehousemen - before making it to see the owner or one of his deputies.  And this was a closed industry. Speculative visits like this from the emissaries of colonising powers were deeply unwelcome. 

Still, it was a hegemonic relationship.  Suppliers might resist our interest and tactics, but they also had to live with them.  In this most mercenary of industries, who could resist  doing business with us when we were so often the highest bidders?

THE GRANDEES OF THE BRITISH Secondary Metal Association were already raising their eyebrows, but apart from shaking up the market, we were doing no wrong.

If the large merchants were unhappy, those lower-down the food chain were largely quick to switch allegiances.

Many genuinely did try to remain loyal to their established business relationships, but in time, we joined their shortlist and they supplied us.

If an adverse price movement took place, suppliers would try to shift very quickly. Then we could nail suppliers down to a promise to deliver that day or the following day.

This was a business about profit margins in fractions of a currency unit: cents per pound of weight in the US, Belgian Franks or Deutschmarks per kilogramme of material in europe.

And as I was later to find out, only the quick-witted or unscrupulous survived and prospered. 

AFTER JUST A MONTH IN OUR NEW environment, Mike bought a huge, hexagonal dealing-desk with oak veneer.  We had leather office chairs to match, and a technology upgrade. 

Now, instead of relying on CEEFAX for the copper price, we subscribed to Reuters.  It was my idea, and I was delighted.

We may have been effectively working in a giant Portakabin, but now we had real-time price information on our individual monitors, just like real traders. 

The service was called 'Commodities 2000' and back then,  the end of the century still seemed a long way in the future.  

Notes:

(1) Unlike me, Rick, an entrepreneur to his bones, stayed in the business.  He emigrated to South Africa and became something of a figurehead in the secondary metals market there.

© Alistair Siddons, 2006

Houston, We've Got a Problem: Radioactive Load

By Alistair Siddons.

FROM THE OUTSIDE, OUR BUSINESS LOOKED LIKE any other on the industrial estate.  But it wasn't.   Who could guess the global nature of our enterprise, or that our sole purpose was to feed a single refinery in Belgium? (1) 

Already, after just a few months of operation, we were shipping over 350 tonnes of copper and tin-bearing scrap every month from London alone.  Sometimes, we shipped 600 tonnes.

We were also buying smaller amounts for Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham - warehouses that didn't yet have dedicated buyers.

Gaining such a rapid hold on an established market was unheard of, and the conspiracy theories began. My favourite was that we were a Mafia money-laundering operation. 

Who else, conspiracy theorists said, could swallow the £2 million a year operating cost for the London warehouse alone? Everyone knew this was a cost-centre.

Not everyone was enamoured by the Americans. Some of the London dealers were card-carrying nationalists, openly xenophobic and scornful of the American presence.

The delivery drivers would give the Americans a hard time, calling them ‘septics,' cockney rhyming-slang for ‘septic tanks’ - to rhyme with 'yanks' - within earshot.

The warehousemen pretty much had to share the joke, or betray men who shared their social background.

And when I ventured into the yard to look over a delivery, I was openly scorned and threatened by some of the suppliers – especially small owners, who made their own deliveries. 

There were few liberally-educated folk with humanities backgrounds working in this industry, especially in Britain.

But if I had nothing in common with our suppliers,  I quickly learnt to get my hands visibly dirty during deliveries by jumping into the load and poking about, as if knowledgeably, with a magnet.  That gained a mixed reaction, but mostly, just silence.

A magnet was a tool of the trade for graders, rather than novice buyers. I had no business owning one at the time, but Mike knew of their cachet and had a couple sent over for us from the US refinery.  We took this as a subtle vote of confidence in our growing experience.

The idea of the magnet was straightforward.  You could easily detect when iron was present and shouldn't be, and you could prove to someone else that you'd spotted it. 

I had yet to meet old-timer graders like Brian, who used to work for a brass foundry and joined one of our operations when we began shipping mixed brass to the Indian subcontinent.  

Brian smoked  roll-ups on the sorting line in open defiance of health and safety regulations and had teeth blackened by dirt and metal dust.  He didn't own a nail brush, but he could wield a mean magnet. 

He used it in more subtle ways than we ever could, by feeling how much pull one of the specialist alloys exerted.

Men of his experience could grade a mixed load of copper from twenty paces.   They tended to work in a role that involved rejecting, rather than accepting, as buyers did. 

If a buyer sent a load to one of our furnaces and our assumptions about its copper content were wrong, they would usually detect the mistake before the load was tipped into the furnace.  

IN THOSE EARLY DAYS, RICK AND I BOUGHT NO LESS THAN 25 TONNES OF SCRAP COPPER on a quiet day and over a hundred tonnes apiece under more favourable conditions.

One day I bought 180 tonnes in one lot and I was very happy. I didn’t care that direct shipments to the refinery in Belgium were proscribed.  'Direct' shipments were those that had gone straight out from a supplier without passing through our system.

And there were very good reasons why every load was supposed to be inspected by an experienced grader in one of the warehouses.

If a big load of scrap arrived in the foundry yard and had to be rejected on quality grounds, the refinery had effectively banked on material that it could no longer use, and it might run short of its production needs, or end up with an awkward mix.

Stopping production and then relining the furnace was prohibitively expensive, yet the whole point of what we were doing was to reduce the unit cost to the refinery of a tonne of scrap copper.

My 180 tonne load arrived on  several low-loaders, which rolled into the platn at the same time.  Each bore a gigantic piece of ship's propeller - way over the dimensions and weight that could be safely tipped into the furnace. 

The refinery refused the material point blank.  They had no choice. The cutting costs would have been astronomical.

Someone senior at the plant phoned Mike.  He wasn't amused.  'What the fuck,' he said, quietly, ' I told to you no direct deliveries.  Those Belgiques aren't very happy.' He wiped his moustache several times and shook his head. 

Mike may only have been the brother of a Chicago cop, but he looked the part.  I kept my head down for a few days.

But we were to hear of more dramatic rejections.  Scrap of Russian provenance was coming down to Belgium through the Baltic states and somebody had shipped a huge load of radioactive bronze. 

That caused a red alert at Metallo Chimique, but  in that milieu, you just had to see the funny side of it. 

If the supplier had done shipped the bronze with his eyes open - and we guessed so - it was an excellent example of just how mercenary this copper refining business was. 

We imagined the conversation. 'Have a go.  It can only be rejected, and who knows, it might get through. '

© Alistair Siddons, 2006

Notes:

(1) Metallo Chimique

Secondary Copper: the Food Chain

By Alistair Siddons.

As secondary (scrap) copper works its way from dealer to bigger dealer and from there to large merchant, value is added by rejecting what shouldn’t be there and grouping what should be there into larger and larger piles. 

Collections of scrap conform to various internationally-recognised standards and the descriptions are called 'grades.'

A large merchant secures a premium over a small dealer’s price.

Even in the secondary copper market, it is not too far fetched to explain this price advantage as ‘brand equity’ – the amount above a competitor’s price for a similar product that a consumer is willing to pay because of invisible product values.  

Of course, the price of copper scrap isn't infinitely high, but is tightly related to the underlying price of pure copper.  So this brand equity is relatively small and finite. 

Uniformity and freedom from undesirable content  begin to to justify this premium.   But it goes further:  rapid payment, prompt and reliable delivery and a reputation for fair dispute settlement all help. 

Put it another way: there's a top price for copper scrap, and you won't hit it unless you can deliver things that just aren't visible in a pile of physical copper.

I'm not suggesting that  the idea of 'brand equity' was consiously applied to suppliers in the physical copper industry in the late eighties, when I joined the international copper refining group to which Chemetco belonged.

But this is how I've come to think of of the price premium in retrospect.

 © Alistair Siddons, 2006

Copper's Toxic Additives

By Alistair Siddons.

I WAS WORKING in a claustrophobic industrial estate with very few landmarks: a workers’ ‘caff’, the smoke from a car-breaker’s yard and the Thames Barrier. 

In the winter, especially, we had hardly any natural daylight.  We ate exclusively junk food.  It was hard on the body,  hard on the soul.

But I had already flown to Belgium a couple of times and seen for myself the gigantic industrial operation that we were feeding, just across the North Sea. 

Still, I couldn’t readily find an over-arching description for the work we were doing. Exactly how you described us depended on what you knew and the perspective you were looking from. We were part of the minerals, mining and extraction industry.

We were an industrial company. We were part of a huge global operation.  That's what interested me.  Of course, we were also part of the chemical industry, but nobody ever thought of it that way.

One thing was clear. Although we were legally a business incorporated in the UK, we had no autonomy.

We may well have had what was called an ‘agency agreement’ with Metallo Chimique, but in fact we were directly accountable to the refinery.

We had an identical WANG midi-computer and we shared the same proprietary software system, which did everything from recording contracts to handling shipping movements and reporting commercial statistics.

We shared managerial and commercial resources and we had daily conference calls with our Belgian colleagues.

Rick and I were soon joined someone of our age from Metallo Chimique, who had signed-up with the company during the pan-European recruiting drive that had snared us.  His name was Arnaud.

AFTER JUST A COUPLE of weeks in the industry, I had already been making late-afternoon and evening calls to Toronto and Quebec, and placing contracts for shipment to Chemetco.

This was a rehearsal for my forthcoming assignment in the United States. From my grotty warehouse in the UK, I was initiating gigantic movements of freight from Canada to the midwest.  

I had to stay at work until 8.00 most nights.  But I enjoyed it.  I was doing something rather unusual, and from an especially bizarre command-centre.

Before I embarked on my US secondment in April 1989, it was clear that our commercial and warehouse operation was a copy-cat of the system used by Chemetco in practically every state of the USA.

We were told of the huge commercial expertise embodied in our overlords - and especially in John Suarez and Bill Wegrzyn (pronounced 'Wiggerson').

By implementing this duo's solid commerical blueprint, we were already complementing the large resources and more traditional approach of Metallo Chimique - an industrial company incorporated in around 1920 - that had probably become rather squeezed in the aggressive global marketplace. They undoubtedly realised this and were doing something radical to sort it out.

And so far, the results were proving wildly successful. Rick and I were highly impressed. What I couldn’t know for many years was that my idealisation of the operation was ill-founded. 

Only years later did it turn out that there were already unthinkable tactics being deployed - not in Europe, but at Chemetco. 

However, Bill Wegrzyn was nothing to do with any of the trouble, and it could never be proved that Johnz Suarez knew about the criminal environmental violations that finally nailed Chemetco in the courts. 

OVER THE WINTER, MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRADE gradually increased. I was buying with fewer and fewer mistakes and sleeping better. I was able to bluff my way through conversations about Chilean copper mines and to use with authority expressions such as ‘nearby tightness in supply.’ This made me very happy.

However, few of us novices yet could yet articulate with any confidence what happened on the clean side of the copper industry, the part where it left our hands and was bought and sold by brokerages on the two international exchanges.

There was a virtual barrier between what we were doing and the traded markets, and one day it dawned on me that with no mentor and no exposure to conversation about what happened in the City, my understanding could only grow very slowly.

We did have someone working with us who'd worked in of the brokerages for years. But he was burnt-out, cynical, and underwhelmed by the things that motivated me and Rick, who were much younger. 

Whenever we tried to get technical or draw out of him this deeper understanding, Mike would shoot us down in flames and tell us to buy something at a better margin. It was a terrible way for Phil to end his career. And there was no going back to the city after working for a producer at his age. I worried about him, what he'd do next.

The received and often explicit view about theory was clear. All we had to know was that when we bought a tonne of something, and the refinery had received it, tipped it into the furnace and refined it, we were in trouble if the refinery didn’t achieve a minimum margin.

It was a lean environment, and there was no room for any behaviour that didn't make a few cents per pound of copper bought for the refinery.

NOVICE BUYERS LIVE AND BREATHE tonnages, but it took me a while to rein in the impulse to acquire tonnes of metal for their own sake. Then for a while, I went the other way and bought nothing unless its margin was better than Rick's.

In the end, I struck a happy medium and the refinery got copper at a healthy margin as well as enough of it.

Now one of the factors that could reduce the margin was the presence of certain elements. Some of these were contaminants, like nickel, that were notoriously expensive to dissociate from copper. Others were environmentally problematic from the point of joining the molten furnace contents onwards.

We looked out for high concentrations of antimony, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium – elements routinely added to certain grades of copper to give them properties fit for their primary usage. Practically all grades could be used, but some attracted a commercial penalty.

Because I knew so little about chemistry, it was comforting to know that we could often rely on visual clues for information about some of these additives, like the greenish-turquoise of catenary wire – the overhead wire used by trains and trams.

 We learnt that cadmium is added to give the wire a high degree of resistance to the electrical arcs that would otherwise quickly pit and erode the metal. And I could soon have a pretty good guess that beryllium was lurking in some of the shinier grades of copper that came to us.

There was even a grade called 'beryllium copper.'  Beryllium, we were told, is added to increase the strength or the conductivity of copper. If it’s added to strengthen the metal, more is present – up to 2%. I learnt that copper strip was likely to contain this relatively high quantity of beryllium.

And gradually, I became more and more interested in the elemental side of our trade.

And about this time, I was heartily disappointed to find that Primo Levi didn’t include copper in his 1975 work, The Periodic Table. He did include tin, however, an element that he describes as a ‘friendly metal’. 

I never did understand what Levi meant by this.  And even when I saw an ingot of pure tin at Metallo Chimique for the first time,  I just thought it looked every bit as expensive as it was. 

Perhaps he meant that it's not deliberately associated with as many toxic additives as copper may be,  but I doubt he was thinking so literally.

The Wire Burners and the Atomic Party

By Alistair Siddons.

ON A WINTER’S AFTERNOON, the high windows at the far end of the warehouse, covered with a film of yellowish dirt, glowed like a paraffin storm-light.

The image came back to me from the dramatic power-cuts of the early seventies. Intense industrial unrest and, for a period, a three-day blue-collar working week had made these blackouts an exciting routine occurrence for a child. 

We had candles at home, and out came the rusty old storm-light that normally lived in the shed.  These unscheduled outages, irksome for adults, were a full-blown treat us as children.

Now, on my way to the end of the warehouse, I used to gently kick bits of scrap off an imaginary footpath. 

Then I'd survey the lots of copper that were waiting to be shipped to Belgium. One bay would be spilling over with old car and lorry radiators. Another would contain a huge tangle of burnt copper wire, with a black residue where the pvc used to be.

This mess was called ‘no 2 wire.’ We used to buy this grade from one or two firms that specialised in the stuff. They'd collect huge heaps of old household and industrial electrical wire, cover it with diesel and set fire to it. The fumes must have been monstrous and I now know that they contained dioxin.

I hadn't even heard of dioxin at the time. But that is what these men did for a living. They burnt wire.  Sometimes they burnt it in old oil drums.  And sometimes, when they had the space, they had huge, open bonfires of it in the middle of the night. 

The wire burners would spray water on the flames after a while, but not always just to put out the fire.

When water hit the burning wire at the right temperature, the pvc peeled away, leaving the exposed metal a purplish-brown colour. This produced an acceptable average of 94% recoverable copper. When the plastic hadn’t been burning for quite long enough, bits of it remained stuck to the copper, which remained oily and black.

Sometimes the heap was still wet when the warehouse men weighed it in. Sometimes, it was clear that a load of fresh water had been tipped into the trailer just before the lorry set off. By the time it got to the refinery, its recoverable copper content might just be nudging 90%. This was a commercial disaster for the refinery and loads like this were always intercepted.

MY FAVOURITE GRADE OF COPPER was the brightest of all -  electrolytic copper - but we saw very little of it. It came from high-voltage, high-current applications, like power-station conducting-rails or busbars. It was trimmed into short lengths by hydraulic shears weighing about twenty tonnes.

The cut faces were lustrous and almost salmon-coloured. I used to fix on this brightness whenever I saw a piece, as if that represented copper in its ideal state. I visualised how everything we shipped out of the warehouse would be tipped into a furnace, melted, refined and finally electrolysed, to this same level of purity.

There was no escaping the material conditions of our work – noise, a continually unpleasant taste in the mouth, the gloomy warehouse - but I could readily think of what we were doing in more abstract terms.

I used to look at the piles of copper tubing, the car and lorry radiators, the heaps of burnt-out wire. And then I’d visualise the transformation they were about to undergo. It wasn't just a radical cleansing of the metal, it was a treat, an atomic party in that furnace.

And I focussed on how we were linked to the survival of a huge range of consumer and industrial markets.  Idealist that I was, this knowledge drove and inspired me.

Vision from the Russian Avant-Garde?

By Alistair Siddons.

DURING THAT FIRST WINTER of 1988-89, I was driven by competitiveness and by the promise of pioneering an extended project in the United States.

While I was waiting, my enthusiasm  sometimes flagged.  And then I upscaled the size and importance of our copper refinery to remind me of its significance.

I IMAGINED A GIGANTIC COPPER busbar (1) fabricated from our copper, carrying electrical power from an oversized nuclear reactor parked across the very centre of Europe. 

The image developed over time. 

Soon, the stoutness of the electrical cable needed to power our economic federation had doubled.  I called this copper power-cable an 'energy-umbilicus.'  

In the final variant of the image, busbars radiated from each direction, like monumental spokes. 

Each was held aloft by great bronze towers of stunning geometry (2)  and the people below looked up in constant wonder at them (3).

The people never doubted the beauty or goodness of this industrial landscape, in which the copper was always bright and pure. 

In all this, I was an alchemist. 

But my alchemy didn't produce gold from copper.  My alchemy was the smelting and re-forming  of our copper in the ladle of Europe: it enabled the continuation of economic and domestic life.

OF COURSE, MY ROLE in the production of our copper wasn't this powerful, and nor did I want it to be. 

I was still looking around, learning and preparing for my trip to the United States.  But if I ever doubted what I was doing, this consciously grandiose vision was enough to keep me going.

References: 

(1) Busbar: the solid copper bar, rectangular in section, used to carry high-voltage, high-current electricity before it reaches the pylon. 

It is made of electrolytic copper at a purity of 99.9% and when new, is lustrous and eye-catching.  

(2) Like the hyperboloid pylons of Vladimir Shukhov, an architect of the Russian avant-garde.

(3) See Ray Eckermann's excellent visualisation of this megalomaniac fantasy, below.  This was specially commissioned as an illustration for Chemetco Before I Knew Better.  

Preparing for Chemetco: a Caveat

By Alistair Siddons.

WHEN I'D BEEN at my new job for a couple of weeks, Mike casually said: 'Of course, you can drive, can't you? Because you can't go to the States otherwise.'

This condition had never crossed my mind.  It was a bit of a threat.  I hadn't bothered learning to drive in any systematic way. 

'Hey, Alistair, I was driving at fifteen', said Mike, looking stunned when I didn't answer immediately.

So I had this small thing to sort out.

Of course, with so much hanging on the outcome of my test, I had to pass it, and I did.  But it was under the wire: 15 March, 1989, less than month before I was due to fly out.

Now there wasn't single obstacle ahead of me.  I was going to Chemetco.

Chemetco Preparations: Five New Vocabularies 

By Alistair Siddons.

BY FEBRUARY 1989, I WAS preparing myself for  my forthcoming adventure in April.

One of the things I needed was to learn extra terminology for the various grades of copper.  In fact,  I considered that I needed five lists of vocabulary. 

1.  Grades of copper for conversations inside the United States.

Technical copper descriptions here are not the same as in the UK.  For example, 'red brass' in the US is 'gunmetal' in the UK.

2. Grades of copper for conversations with international dealers using a different convention.  For example, 'no. 2 wire' is known as 'birch' under this convention

3.  Grades of copper for talk with French-speaking sellers in Québec.

4.  Québécois crib-sheet for general talk in Québec, which has a vocabulary not heard elsewhere.

5.  Slang crib-sheet for Québec.  I didn't want to miss out on the finer points of conversation.

It's true that I balked when I worked out I needed five lists. 

In fact, there was little I could do to pick up a Québecker's slang and learn its correct application from the UK,  but I did find a couple of guides to Québec French easily enough.

My focus had to be on the first three lists to start with.

Long story short, now I was parrot-learning vocab for the first time in many years.  But I didn't mind.  I was getting ready for my mission.

And at the time, that's how I saw it.  I'd been recruited and trained for the assignment that was to follow and the moment had been a long time coming.

I think I expected more from the trip than anybody else did, as if it would unlock the last secrets of copper.

And this came to pass.  But not in a way that I'd predicted.

© Alistair Siddons, 2007

Flying to Chemetco: April 1989

By Alistair Siddons.

ON 10 APRIL 1989 I flew to Chicago and took a connecting flight to Lambert-St Louis Airport.

In the late afternoon, I was greeted at the quiet airport by an energetic man in his early forties.

He was short, with an over-sincere voice and a beard. He rocked onto his toes slightly when he met me and gave me a salesman's handshake, twisting his arm anti-clockwise.

His name was Greg. ‘Alistair, see how I asked you that question? He who asks the questions controls the conversation,’ was one of Greg’s gambits during our drive to the car-rental depot.

Greg asked a lot of questions, only to immediately answer them himself, as if he were giving a class in rhetoric.

But over the short journey, I could put up with it. Greg - or should I say, Chemetco - hired me a red Chrysler le Baron turbo with ten miles on the clock.  Only once did I make the mistake of calling it a 'coo-pay,' instead of a 'coupe,' the American way.

But I was finally there, in the Midwest, with my own transport. 

Chemetco - Touchdown 

By Alistair Siddons

WHEN I ARRIVED IN THE USA it was cold, with a sharp ground frost at night.  But by the end of the third week of April 1989, St Louis was reaching a humid mid-twenties by day and dropping no lower than about ten centigrade at night. 

Elsewhere, the temperature was also rising. On the 15th April, I watched the Tianmen student protests begin on CNN.

My biggest surprise when I  arrived at Chemetco for the first time was the buildings.

I had visualised the refining side as an activity distributed over a huge area, and indeed it was  - nearly 50 acres of it.

You just couldn't see the extent of the site, which contained a tight grouping of sheds and corroded, high-roofed buildings, not only coated with rust, but seeming to be fashioned from the stuff.

On that first tour round the premises, I noticed the huge step-down transformer, bringing in electricity from the national network. 

The current was rectified and then fed into the tank-house, where anodes were electrolysed into higher-purity cathodes.  Chemetco was still producing cathodes when I was there. 

They stopped a few years later and sold anodes instead, to the gigantic miner-smelter Asarco in Tucson, Arizona. 

Outfits like this had much larger facilities for electrolysis, but to this day, I'm still not clear whether there was a fiscal or an environmental reason for Chemetco's abandonment of electrolysis.

A GROWING PILE OF HARD, black residue - the main refining by-product – was fed by a conveyor belt and a giant hopper.

Drums of chemicals were piled up here and there and messy heaps of copper scrap were waiting to be grabbed and thrown into the furnace.

Although I had been to a guided copper refinery tour in Belgium a couple of times, I was overwhelmed with curiosity, as if I had never seen the like of this before. As I looked around the plant, I felt as if I knew nothing.

I could ask – I did ask – what’s that shed for? What happens in there? Where’s that bag of dust from? How much copper does that contain? But for every question I asked, the answer produced ten more.

My tour of the offices was much shorter, but long enough for me to note with interest that the same WANG computer hardware that I’d seen in our London office was used here. I went to my desk and logged on.

The screen lit up with the familiar green of the integrated software system that was used by Metallo Chimique and international offices throughout the operation.

I warmed-up with buying calls to English-speaking firms in Toronto.  These proved harder than they'd been in the UK, even though my grade preparation was more than adequate.  I knew that ‘red brass,’ for example, was what we called 'gunmetal' in the UK.  That was fine.

But when it came to faucets, well, I knew the word ‘faucet’, but it threw me when I had to use the term myself, because it forced me to imitate the accent of the person I was speaking to.

And I had a lot to prove to the buyers around me. They were watching me. Experts in their catchment areas, often an entire state, I overheard them dealing with problem loads, giving a knock-back, talking sport, chewing the fat.

These guys chewed the fat a great deal. I think they’d long passed the competitive stage of their careers. They’d settled down. This was their home, where they chewed fat with their lists of suppliers. It was a cosy arrangement.

During my breaks, I used to go out and watch the inventories rise and fall. Semi trailers – what we call HGV’s in the UK – came in droves from all over the United States, and the plant also had its own railhead.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine how this plant was capable of producing well over 100,000 tonnes of refined copper per annum.

I saw that a lot of drivers were Mexican: separate signs at the entrance and in the receiving yard were in Spanish.

Inside Chemetco: But Where's the Corporation?   

MOSTLY, I STAYED INSIDE THE PLANT.  This wasn't the place to pop out and stretch your legs. You could be squashed by heavy plant or reversing trucks. 

By the time you got inside the office, you could taste the distinctive dust. It came partly from the copper-bearing scrap inventories in the yard, and partly from refining process by-products.  I wish I'd had the foresight to have it analysed, to see just how much lead and heavy metals it contained.  If you wanted to enjoy a cup of coffee, it was better to rinse your mouth out with water first (1) but of course, you never bothered.  By the end of the day, dust coated the inside of my rented car, parked about 50 metres away from the office.

At lunchtime, for a breath of comparatively fresh air, you could get in your car and drive down for a burger and fries at a place in Hartford, a mile down the road.  I mean Macdonald's, of course.

BECAUSE CHEMETCO WAS A ‘Delaware corporation’, I expected it to have a substantial corporate structure, managers and administrators (2).  And right until the moment when I first saw the plant, I imagined it would have a shiny, corporate building. It's not something I needed, but I expected it.  

But it didn't.  If there was an epicentre at all, a place where things were worked out, it was the board-room.  But even this was only a casual meeting room at the side of a narrow corridor leading to the buyer's room.

The meeting room had a veneered table and chromed chairs and was panelled in a shiny false veneer.  Inspirational prints with swirly pastel themes adorned the walls, as if to soften the maleness of the place. 

Beyond the meeting-room was a locker-room where the men got kitted up for work. 

And beyond that was a chemical land of slag, waste, solvents and acids.  Out here were great mounds of black stuff like moonrock, with smoothed-down tracks where bulldozers had crept along to keep control of the shape.  

Out here were concrete channels and pits and pools of water and blue lakes of copper sulphate.   You needed an orienteer's map, with little symbols for a berm or a hill or a ditch, to get the measure of this place. 

I wanted to spend more time out here, understanding the shape of it all, but that wasn't why I was here. And there was never a free moment.

AFTER A FEW DAYS I REALISED THAT BETWEEN the buyers and the top, there was nobody. Occasionally, someone would talk about John Suarez, just as they did back in London. He was the president of the Chemetco. Or they’d mention Denis Feron, (pronounced ‘pherone,’), who owned the plant at the time.  

Now the European top-brass at Metallo Chimique and Ercosa wore fine leather jackets, but Suarez had more style and wore denim and cowboy boots.  And if there was one place where this attire made sense, it was surely out here and beyond, in this industrial Wild West.

Between Suarez and the buyers was no distance at all, but he owned property all over the United States and we did not.

Now the buyers with me in that office had a vague hierarchy, based on length of service, knowledge of the dirty side of copper and size of territory. 

One of the sharpest buyers there was conspicuously smarter than anyone I'd met in any of the companies up to this point.  Denis Meyer was a fluent Spanish speaker who was later to be exported to a plant in Ercosa – a plant that I had no reason ever to visit, but which I knew to be one of the companies in an international triangle of refineries. 

Denis Meyer and Kris Wouters from Metallo Chimique were the two guys in our refining group that inspired the greatest confidence for their combination of copper savvy, charm and general smarts.  Kris was affectionately known as 'The Poodle', because of his  extravagantly curly hair.  

While I was at Chemetco, Denis talked loudly and confidently while handling big tranches of territory in Arizona.  Like me, he had a global perspective on the operation.

However genial, most of the guys with me in that room in their trainers and baseball hats were going nowhere.  Most didn't really know what to make of me.  There was a bit of joshing about being a Brit.  Just one or two called me a 'Limey', which could sound slightly barbed.  But they mostly left me uninterrupted to do my work.  Even Greg hardly said a word to me at work.  'Hey, Alistair,' was his usual.

Still, one of the buyers, Steve, helped me to settle-in by showing me the local sights. 

We drank Budweiser in a sports bar down the road and played a game where you take turns to shove a coin down a table. The second player tries to dislodge his opponent’s coin, and a moment of high drama is when a coin falls off the end. 

We drank beer.  We played the coin game a couple of times.  Steve talked a bit about sport, watching the overhead screen.  And that was about it.   

I USED TO LOOK AROUND  the buyers' room,  at the brown coating on the blinds and at the overall brownishness of the place.  How could just a handful of buyers keep the metal coming, day after day? And how could they endure this confinement here?  And the brownness?

The blinds were permanently half-shut, but if you opened them, the view just reminded you to get on and buy some more metal.   You'd see a clamshell grab trundling about outside, or hear the roar of a 40 tonnes of copper pouring onto the ground from a trailer.  And then you'd turn round, pick up the phone and buy some more copper.

AFTER A WHILE I GOT THE SENSE that the people who mixed up the metals in the pot, melted them and refined them, who adjusted things out there, who disposed of the waste – they ran the business more than we did.  

Perhaps they felt that the buyers brought more to the table than they did.  I doubt it.  In reality, the jobs were equally vital, but each defined itself by opposition to the other.  

Still, if the yard foreman said that a load had been rejected because its recoverable copper content was too low for its grade, that was it.  It wasn't going anywhere near the furnaces. 

Such was the degree of separation between the buyers and the plant that I never saw where these career copper men would take their breaks, what they ate or when.  I wanted to know more about their world, but in a million years, you'd never find out by just asking them.

What I didn't know at the time was that this plant, Chemetco, was only one of many metal smelters in the area.  There was a massive steelworks in Granite City, just down the road.  There was a zinc smelter not so far away, and a lead smelter.  These were metal men, working for just one of several of the local companies that could employ them.

So their outlook and mine could hardly have been more different.   In this blue-collar belt, I was very much the outsider, and not just because I was from London.   

EVEN WITH THIS DIRECT EXPOSURE to the guts of a messy industry, it took a long time for me to understand the scale of industry in the United States.   

Put it this way: when I heard, just a few years ago, that somebody had become a millionaire by setting up a business servicing torque-wrenches, I fell off my chair.   In fact, if he'd made a million selling the torque-wrenches themselves, that would have been surprise enough.  

A couple of weeks into my secondment, I took a tour to a couple of ‘industrial’ warehouses. It was initially perplexing that some grades of copper scrap could be more industrial than others.

At one level, ‘industrial’ meant straight out of industrial processes. But to a new buyer, it just appears to be stuff that is filthier and generally of a lower copper percentage than the higher grades.

It includes swarf from turning a lathe, which is oily and clumps together. In the UK, it includes ‘drosses’ and ‘skimmings’ from brass foundries. These are the lowest of the low, in name and copper content, but our operation could accommodate them.

Even back then, the arm of Chemetco that dealt with material of industrial origin had seen a highly lucrative market in used catalytic converters from cars.

These ‘cats’ cost just a few dollars at the time, but the platinum substrate inside was worth a great deal more. The industrial warehouses offered a cash-payment-on-collection service to car-breakers. They were buying the breaker’s car and lorry radiators anyway, and now the proprietor could make a few extra bucks by piling up converters, which were a highly-established technology in the United States.

Especially with mama ‘n’ papa businesses, it mattered that as far as the breaker was concerned, he was dealing with a small, local firm. There was no sign that he was dealing with a distant corporation. These friendly, local, warehouses went by the name of Triangle Metals - and, confusingly, 'Tri-Me.'  

Now 'Tri-Me' looks like a simple abbreviation of Triangle Metals, but it isn't. It's no wonder that many years later, when I met Laura Grandy, the bankruptcy trustee for Chemetco, she was exasperated by the proliferation of insider companies associated with Chemetco.

Notes:

(1) Catherine Copley, Illinois state environmental toxicologist, notes: 'Along with zinc, this residue also contains large amounts of lead, cadmium and copper.  The material coats nearly everything in the plant.'  Catherine Copley, ATSDR Health Consultation, Chemetco, 2004. 

(2) Delaware Corporation.  Many blue-chip US companies are registered in Delaware, including more than half the Fortune 500 list.  So I expected Chemetco to have the external attributes of a Delaware Corporation. 

© Alistair Siddons, 2007

Chemetco: Of Wells and Wetlands

By Alistair Siddons.

I HAD NO IDEA THAT CHEMETCO'S PLANT BACKED ONTO WETLANDS, just behind the parking lot where the semis all waited to unload.

I had no idea that just behind me was a tributary of the Mississippi called Long Lake.

I crossed the great river every day on the way to work, but I didn’t know that right here, we were within metres of being hydraulically connected to it.

I approached the refinery from the direction of St Louis, along state highway 3. It was curiously sited.

The diesel turbines of the Mack trucks that weren’t stopping at Chemetco whined further along the highway towards the cluster of heavy industries just to the north, where colossal oil refineries were gathered.

But the plant sat on its own, with agricultural land on three sides. A solitary wooden farm-house, immaculately painted in white, stood about a hundred metres away on the opposite side of the road.

It would have been an idyllic setting, but for the stench of the plant, a mixture of flue gases and heavy-metal laden zinc oxide dust.

I DIDN'T KNOW until many years later that planners once envisaged a denser concentration of industry here.

But because of the wetland, Chemetco was sitting as far south as it was possible to build anything. Still, an incongruous gap remained to the north of the plant.

A field backed right on to refinery boundary fence and I wondered what kind of unpalatable fodder would grow so close to the fallout.

I had no idea at the time that people lived just to the south and east, in an area called Mitchell.

I had no idea that people drew water from wells dug right here.

Outside Chemetco: from Wichita to Boulder

By Alistair Siddons. 

I CROSSED THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER TWICE A DAY, using a choice of bridges. In the evening, I sometimes walked down to the banks of the great river, just a few minutes from my condo.

The water was very low that spring¹ and I almost forgot where I was and expected to see hippopotamus wallowing in the extensive muddy beaches.

Instead I saw barges, and wondered how long they’d be able to keep navigating the river.

There was nothing to see or do in my settlement, except drive to the shopping mall. I had books with me, but I stopped reading. I didn’t come all this way to stay inside and read.

Fortunately, I’d been given a per diem payment of about $20 for living expenses, and I was only too happy to spend it on petrol. At weekends, I drove as far as possible.

IT WAS AS IF BY DRIVING, I could lose my identity and become American. It turned out that I was wrong about that.

Some of the guys were very surprised that when I overshot Edwardsville on the way to have dinner with Greg and his wife, I just kept going till I reached Kansas.

The following weekend, I drove to Wichita. I had been listening to a Pat Metheny track entitled ‘As falls Wichita falls, so falls Wichita.’

When I reached Wichita and couldn’t find the falls, I turned back. I didn’t know it at the time, but while Wichita is in Kansas, Wichita Falls are in Texas.

Of course I realised that it wasn’t an innate property of America to make you keep going like this. It was my idealisation of the place and my sense of being on a mission for Chemetco that made me believe it.

If someone told me to ‘drive for a couple of blocks’, it made no difference to me if I made a mistake and overshot. I'd just shrug my shoulders and carry on driving. An on, and on.

Eventually I’d find my way home, slowing to marvel at the glowing retinas of the deer standing in the middle of the road.

MORE THAN A COUPLE OF THE BUYERS AT THE PLANT had never been to another state, let alone driven across several states for the weekend. That surprised me at the time. They told me to leave the car next time and fly.

I couldn’t explain that getting there quickly wasn’t the point.  They shrugged their shoulders.  I shrugged mine.

But there was one exception. Lance, who was working at Chemetco for a couple of months, shared my road-movie fascination with driving. He’d been posted from the Minnesota warehouse.

So one weekend we repeated an earlier tour of mine, up to Kansas City and down through the wooden bridges further south.  Along the way, we made up spoof radio shows, like this.

Save Our Possums 

Presenter:  'So I'm here driving along with Lemuel Rube of the possum protection society.  Rube, how y'all doing?'

Lemuel: 'I'm doing alright.  Better than these possums here anyways, getting squashed the whole time.'

Presenter:  'Well, yes.  But I see you've developed something to help the possums, right?'

Lemuel:  'Yeah, we gotta invention here helps them out.'

Presenter:  'So what happens is, we're driving along and we've got this kind of giant hopper in front of us on two arms like a bulldozer bucket.   And it gently scoops up the possums from the road and...'

Lemuel:   'Keeps 'em safe.

Presenter:  Yes, that's right.  But I see we've got all sorts of animals in there.  We've got deer...'

Lemuel: 'We've got worms, we've got ladybugs.  Hell, what's my wife doin' in there!'  

[Voice of Lemuel's wife] 'Let me out of here...!'

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, Lance and I followed Route 66 as far as Boulder, Colorado and back. 

We took ‘No-Doz’ – an over-the-counter caffeine and ephedrine mix - and drove through the day and night. We stopped only to eat fast food and drink coffee. On the way we made up blues songs. 

We got to Boulder, switched off the engine for five minutes and turned round just in time to arrive back at work at Chemetco on Monday morning.  It was an extravagant mission, but we had lived the Route 66 dream, intensely but surely.

Another time, I drove up to Chicago in a heavy rainstorm. A State Trooper stopped me for speeding near Springfield.

At 93 mph in a new car, he thought I was a fugitive from a felony. ‘Sir, I could impound your car, tow you across the state border and bail you to appear in court in two weeks’ time,’ he warned.

I didn’t go above 60 again, but I carried on driving.  All I did was work at Chemetco and drive.

I SPENT THAT WEEKEND IN CHICAGO, at the company apartment, overlooking Lake Michigan. The apartment was huge, immaculately furnished and adorned with two vases of fresh flowers. I stood and watched the lake, wondering how the owners of the plant had started in the business. 

I wondered if they minded that in this Sears Tower city there were businesses two or three orders of magnitude bigger. I had no idea what they thought.

I played chess by the lake and went to Lincoln Park zoo.

Notes:

1: 'The water was very low that spring': not surprisingly.  1988-1989 was one of the worst droughts on record in the United States. 

Goodbye Midwest, Hello Quebec 

By Alistair Siddons 

WHEN THE TIME CAME to leave America and fly to Canada, my car had gone through its first and second service thresholds. But I hadn't even noticed.

And I didn't know that the company would be charged 8 cents a mile for every mile that I travelled.

I'd driven 13,000 miles in five weekends, spread over just a couple of months. This left a sasquatch of a carbon footprint and was an extravaganza I'd never dream of repeating now.

IN QUÉBEC, I VISITED AS MANY SUPPLIERS AS I COULD. On top of my role as a credible copper buyer backed by an infinitely large corporate cheque-book, I was an ambassador for Chemetco.

With the top-tier merchants, the talk was very much about playing up the benign territorial conquests of Chemetco, its international credentials and its infinite hunger for more metal.

Of course it was a company that had grown-up with trans-border deals (true). Of course it could happily buy 100 tonne lots (true, but this wasn't desirable as a routine practice). 

Chemetco's main problem in this region was the copper production giant, Noranda.  With several production facilities in Québec, it had a huge capacity for certain high grades of copper scrap, and since its plant were nearer, lower acquisition costs in the local market.  Noranda kept prices buoyant and seemed to be hurting Chemetco.

With the medium and lower-tier merchants, of whom many were francophone by preference, there was rather more work to be done.

Many of these companies were afraid of their material being rejected by the refinery, at great cost to themselves.

But I was able to point out that the Chemetco warehouse system served as a grading, payment and shipping point, and the risk to the seller was practically nil once he'd left the premises with his cheque.

I HAD MIXED FEELINGS about this part of the trip. I was sending big loads of material down to Chemetco with a healthy margin, but I found it frustrating that I could no longer see the results of my deals in the foundry yard.

Being so far away from the plant made the material reality of refining difficult to bring to mind. The plant interested me deeply, and I was already wondering when I'd be able to go back there.

Under different circumstances, I would have been able to distinguish my work identity from my broader personality.

But for all my interest in the language and other cultural specificities of Montréal, I couldn't engage with my this side of my environment as much as I wanted to. 

The contrast between the cultural riches of the city of Montréal and the steely, blue-collar belt of Illinois was a shock, and made me feel as if I were two people, arguing pointlessly over which population centre had more to contribute to the world.

And this phase of my trip was an isolating experience. Apart from one meeting with the warehouse manager, Laurent, I saw nobody from the company, and Chemetco seemed happy to use my logged contracts as a sufficient report of my progress.  So I had no phone contact with anyone at the plant.

ONE DAY A MERCHANT invited me to a breakfast meeting in the penthouse suite of a hotel. His wife, rather younger, came to the meeting, too.

I realised that I was supposed to be impressed by the surroundings, so I did my best to live up to what was expected.

I don't know if I was supposed to promise top-dollar deals in perpetuity, or whether the merchant just enjoyed doing business over a delicate breakfast. But the daintiness of the setting was curiously out of kilter with the muckiness of the business.

A couple of hours later I was in the rain, amid dogs, industrial salvage and processing equipment. By some curious quirk of personality, I'd always enjoyed the aesthetics of industrial places and plant.

I'm not saying I could see endless beauty in a pylon, or that I didn't find much about industry ugly. But I could enter a state of deep fascination with these absurd industrial premises, and the more ancient and chaotic, the better.

OF COURSE MY TRIP HAD to end, and I returned to the United Kingdom in late June 1989. My project was successful.  Chemetco had established more than a toehold in Québec and now recruited a francophone buyer based in Montréal to take over what I'd started.

Once back in Europe, my local command-centre, once again, was Metallo Chimique.  I was to have no direct contact with Chemetco for many years.  And when I did, the company no longer existed.

Chemetco's Criminal Wrongdoing

By Alistair Siddons. 

ONE DAY EARLY IN 2002, almost ten years after I'd left the copper industry, I began to wonder how the copper refineries I had worked for reacted to the assumption that corporations need a presence on the internet. But why the question?

I knew that the companies I was interested in were privately owned, tended to avoid external communications beyond the bare minimum and had industrial customers, so I wasn’t expecting the honed messaging of a listed pharmaceutical company.

But instead of a corporate website, this was the article I saw at the top of the list when I searched: 'Chemetco.'

'May 1999 U.S. Water News Online, BELLEVILLE , Ill.

A federal grand jury has indicted Chemetco Inc., its president, and five employees for allegedly using a secret pipe to dump pollutants from the company's copper smelting plant in south-western Illinois into a tributary of the Mississippi River .

'State and federal investigators say the six men were responsible for releasing zinc, lead, and cadmium from Chemetco's plant near Hartford into Long Lake and nearby wetlands. State and U.S. inspectors say they discovered the pipe in 1996 -- 10 years after it was allegedly constructed.'

THE STORY STUNNED ME.  And I was especially curious about the reference to Denis Feron, the president of the company. After all, this Denis Feron was also the largest shareholder of Metallo Chimique, the European foundry that I had worked for from 1988 until the early nineties.

But all I found was an outline of the bare facts of the discovery and the extent of the fine on conviction. Even this story had very little currency outside the trade and local press, and the story I wanted to read hadn’t even been written.

Now I understood that privately-owned corporations arouse less curiosity than publicly-owned corporations. I understood, too, that Chemetco’s employee headcount of about 200 made this appear to be a local story, particulary because Chemetco wasnt' a global consumer brand.

But I also saw that this Chemetco alone accounted for over half the United States output of refined copper from sources other than mine production. This was a significant contribution, especially in relation to the size of the physical premises. 

BY AUTUMN 2004, I realised that I couldn't let Chemetco disappear from the map without finding out exactly what had happened. I think the birth of our child, a year earlier, may have had something to do with this. I wanted to be able to account for everything I had ever done in my professional life, without ever glorifying the unpalatable.  I could hardly just efface the fifteen years I'd spent thinking well of Chemetco.

And over the years, I had become deeply interested in the meaning of the catchphrase ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR).

By the early 2000s, CSR was to become for me little more than an enterprise for the reputation-management of chief executives and ethically-compromised corporations: cause this social ill here, offset it by loudly sponsoring a community mural here. But be sure to carefully manage resulting photo opportunities and don't forget to count and celebrate your media impressions.

IN FACT, THIS VIEW OF CSR pre-dated my knowledge of the Chemetco case, and the Chemetco I had known never pretended to be interested in 'messaging' the outside world.  This was an opaque industry and both the refineries I knew were inpenetrable.

Regardless, I knew that in many circles, any expression of cynicism about CSR was anathema. It was likely to get you grouped with rioting global anarchists and naïve college puritans.

However, my Chemetco experience did get me to think about another facet of CSR. Just what was the implicit contract between corporations and those working for them?

Specifically, what duty did an employee have to find out about the social conscience of its employer? How could caring about this be followed-up in practice? Could it be followed up at all, or was fiduciary duty an overwhelming force?

Chemetco revisited: January 2005

By Alistair Siddons. 

ON 22 JANUARY 2005, I FLEW FROM LONDON TO CHICAGO, from where I'd booked a connecting flight to Lambert-St Louis airport.  

It was time for me to return to Chemetco and complete the field research that would enable me to understand and write the story of the corporate wrongdoing that had almost passed me by. I’d made the necessary contacts I needed from the UK.

Now, temporarily stranded in the late afternoon - Chicago airport was under a heavy blizzard and the runways were closed - I had plenty of time to kill. 

And as if to remind me why I'd felt compelled to return to America, here I was, staring at a special feature in the latest edition of the Economist magazine.  Pages and pages were devoted to the scrutiny of corporate social responsibility.

Under the strap line ‘Companies that merely compete and prosper make society better off’, I read: ‘So far as environmental externalities are concerned, most leading advocates of CSR seem to be in the grip of a grossly exaggerated environmental pessimism' (1).

Yet before I knew about Chemetco's wrongdoing, I was an environmental optimist.

That had all changed now.

Even in the most advanced economy in the world, a spectacular market failure had taken place.

For years, Chemetco had failed to pay the full cost of the pollution it had been creating. And as I was about to find out, even after its conviction, Chemetco would walk away without paying the cost of the pollution it created.

ON MONDAY 24TH JANUARY 2005, LAURA GRANDY, the bankruptcy trustee in the case, greeted me at the gate of the sealed plant, where a prominent sign greeted visitors: ‘Chemetco: first in people, quality, service.’

I wondered at the hollowness of this corporate message, one that I’d taken at face value the first time I read the sign in April 1989.

Over the past two days, I’d already photographed the surroundings of the plant from every angle and driven up and down the interstate to refamiliarise myself with Chemetco's surroundings.

But this was my first time inside the plant for over fifteen years.

Laura Grandy escorted me past the security gate to the ‘boardroom’, whose louvred blinds were pulled shut. We were at a laminated table with four cheap office chairs. On one wall was a whiteboard and underneath, a great pile of corporate chequebook stubs.

The polystyrene ceiling tiles were drooping in places and a brown tidemark showed where they had recently dried off. Under our feet were brown vinyl floor tiles.

I remembered this brown, which was exactly the right tone to handle the residue that built up over every surface of the plant interior.

At one end of the room was a pull-down projector screen, hanging down from a couple of stout eye-bolts screwed to brackets. This was the work of a mechanic who cared more for the robustness of his work than for its ability to blend-in with the décor.

But today, as I listened to Laura Grandy tell me that the plant had attracted strong interest from three potential buyers – two local and one international – I was interested in every detail of my environment.

On a wall at one end of the boardroom - which was clad in brown false veneer - was a picture which embodied an epithet: ‘Each according to the dictates of his conscience.’ I wondered if this piece of artwork was the private joke of the architect of the secret pipe.

It even occurred to me that the pipe might have become an open secret in certain Chemetco circles: perhaps I would never know.

As I was leaving the room to take a tour of the plant, the caption of a poster caught my eye: ‘Success is a Journey, Not a Destination,’ its knowing message proclaimed.

Similar posters had once bedecked our office walls in London and I wondered whose taste they expressed.

THE BUYERS' OFFICE WAS AS BROWN as I'd remembered it and the drinks machine was in the same place as when I'd last bought a diet Coke, but now the mains was disconnected.

Outside, in the shadow-laden sunshine of the hour before sunset, I took a walk round the plant once again.

The giant transformer that once stepped-down the high voltage from the national grid to feed the electrolysis plant had been taken back by the power company.  Next to the gap where it had been, the furnace room was now impossibly quiet. 

I passed a shiny stainless steel structure in the refinery yard. This was a ‘snorkel’, a specially constructed funnel designed to fit snugly over a furnace to gather and extract fumes from the refining process.

‘See that?’ said the security guard, a skilled former employee of Chemetco who had been working at the plant for many years, ‘that’s $85,000 dollars worth of metal. ’

I looked at this strangely beautiful casting, then back at the brown plant buildings, many now thirty years old.

If Chemetco had kept going after its environmental wrongdoing, could it ever have patched up its plant and stayed competitive and lawful in the global marketplace?

References:

(1) Clive Crook, 'Profit and the Public Good.' Economist Magazine. January 22, 2005.

© Alistair Siddons, 2006