Supreme Court Rejects W.R. Grace Appeal

October 11, 2006 - On Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to release W.R. Grace and Company from a $54 million clean-up bill for their vermiculite facility in Libby, Montana.

In an article penned by the Associated Press, reporter Mark Sherman noted that the justices “rejected without comment Grace's appeal of lower court rulings that said the company was responsible for the entire cost of removing asbestos-contaminated soil in Libby.”

Grace had argued that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who’s responsible for overseeing the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites, had no right to saddle them with the entire clean-up bill.  The Supreme Court believed otherwise.  The EPA had sued W.R. Grace in 2001 to recover the clean-up costs.

"The situation confronting the EPA in Libby is truly extraordinary," the appeals court wrote in its opinion in December. "We cannot escape the fact that people are sick and dying as a result of this continuing exposure."

Solicitor General Paul Clement had already urged the justices not to side with Grace, who has one of the worst environmental records in the nation and whose asbestos-contaminated vermiculite has sickened hundreds in Libby and in other U.S. towns where factories processed the material.

The article pointed out that last year, EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson projected that the clean-up in Libby would take at least five to six more years.