Noord-Holland province allowed Tata Steel to leak carcinogenic for decades

For over two decades, the province of Noord-Holland allowed a Tata Steel factory to leak too many carcinogens into the environment, NU.nl reports based on research for its podcast Tata’s ijzeren greep. In the 1980s, the province discovered that one of the Hoogovens (now Tata Steel) coke gas factories in Wijk aan Zee was leaking too many carcinogenic and ordered the oven doors replaced with tighter models. That didn’t happen until 2007, according to the newspaper.

In the late 1970s, researchers discovered that there were too many PAH substances in the air around the blast furnaces, noting that the coking factories had “a significant influence” on the amount of carcinogenic substances in the environment. The province spoke with Hoogovens about a follow-up study with measurements at the coking factories themselves, but that stranded over a disagreement about the costs, NU.nl found in its archive research.

PAH stands for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a group of carcinogenic substances released during incomplete combustion. For example, they’re found in smoke from fireplaces, cigarettes, and coal stoves. The Tata Steel coke factories make coke from coal by cooking at a very high temperature in hundreds of ovens. The coke is then used in the blast furnaces to make iron. The coke-making process releases PAHs.

In 1983, the province noticed that coke factory 2 emitted too many carcinogenic substances through its oven doors. In 1987, that was one of the nine “structural” violations of the Hoogovens permit that the Provincial Water Management listed in an internal document.

The province wanted Hoogovens to install new oven doors, but in an environmental deal concluded with the provincial government in 1988, new oven doors weren’t listed as a necessary adjustment. As a result, the oven doors continued to leak carcinogenic PAHs into the environment for nearly 20 years to come.

At the end of the 1990s, the permit authority again noticed that the oven doors at coke factory 2 leaked more substances than permitted. It set up a study, concluding that spring-loaded doors should be installed. These were finally installed in 2007, twenty years after the province first identified the problem.

The archive documents do not show exactly how high the emissions from the leaking oven doors were, NU.nl reports.

“We knew that PAHs were carcinogenic; there was no doubt about that,” toxicologist Jacob de Boer of the Vrije Universiteit told NU.nl. “That should have gotten more attention.” He thinks that the emissions of PAH substances from the steel factory can be directly linked to the relatively high number of cancer cases in the IJmond.