Copyright Baton Rouge Advocate
A long-troubled bauxite refinery along the Mississippi River near Gramercy hit with a compliance order and threat of fines earlier this year is now facing a lawsuit in federal court from a regional environmental group over its ponds of so-called "red mud" waste. The Louisiana Environmental Action Network claims the series of problems identified by state regulators at Atlantic Alumina, also known as Atalco, indicated a lack of care about the impact of its operations in St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes. The group says it wants to ensure the state forces an effective remedy to alleged problems that included seepage of bright red caustic liquid into the Blind River Swamp. The suit is being brought under provisions that allow citizens to bring legal action to enforce federal clean water and solid and hazardous waste laws. LEAN alleges its members own property along waterways affected by the discharges or use them for recreation. The 17-page suit recounts the findings of state Department of Environmental Quality inspectors from a series of visits between September 2024 and June 2025 documenting problems with storage ponds holding "red mud," as well as dozens of Atalco's own self-reported violations of its water discharge permit. With a highly alkaline quality, red mud can be contaminated with trace amounts of naturally occurring heavy metals, like mercury, and has slight radioactivity from elements like uranium and its decay isotopes, past company testing has shown. The suit noted that red mud would be treated as a hazardous waste if not for a specific federal exemption. "In the aggregate, this litany of violations demonstrates that defendant’s lack of care for the proper operation of the facility has been reckless and with egregious disregard for the environmental and human impacts of its mismanagement," the LEAN lawsuit alleges. Clay Garside, an attorney for LEAN, said the suit mirrors the state's allegations because, if not for the inspectors, no one would have known about many of the problems because they weren't reported by Atalco, as they should have been. But he said the DEQ compliance order, which was issued Aug. 22, only raises the prospect of penalties and LEAN wants to ensure there is follow-through. "We want to make sure it gets cleaned up and that they have to pay for what they've saved in running the place poorly over all those years," he said. In a statement, Atalco officials said that the issues raised in the lawsuit "are being fully and thoroughly enforced by LDEQ" through the compliance order. Company officials have previously said they began making repairs to stop seepage from the red mud ponds before the compliance order was issued on Aug. 22. In later regulatory papers, they told DEQ they were working to address the other alleged violations and developing required work plans. Alumina process The suit asks a federal judge to declare that Atalco has violated the terms of its state permits as well as federal water and solid and hazardous waste laws. It also asks that the judge order Atalco "to take all actions necessary, including the installation of appropriate treatment technology, to prevent" future violations and award civil penalties based on the number of days the violations occurred. Marylee Orr, executive director of LEAN, said anyone who lives near Atalco or has driven past it has seen the problems for years and has had enough. "This has been an eyesore in the state for a really long time," she said. Through the years, some environmental groups have criticized the size of fines and settlement payments DEQ has levied against often large national and multinational companies for past environmental violations. Often those fines are in the thousand to tens of thousands of dollars and can be well below the agency's statutory authority. In settlements, DEQ officials apply a decision matrix with set penalty ranges that aim at balancing the seriousness of a violation with its impact on people and property. DEQ officials did not respond to a request for comment but, typically under agency policy, don't speak about pending litigation. The LEAN suit was filed Oct. 31 in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. Founded in the late 1950s by Kaiser Aluminum, the refinery extracts alumina from red bauxite ore mined in Jamaica. Alumina is used by smelters elsewhere to make aluminum and by other companies for chemical products. Atalco is the only refinery of its kind in the United States and provides the key feedstock for aluminum, a metal critical for military and aerospace applications. But the standard process of extracting alumina leaves behind 1 to 1.5 pounds of waste red mud for every pound of alumina produced, according to the company and industry estimates. The red mud is held in leveed impoundments known as "lakes" or "ponds," which, at Atalco, stretch out for hundreds of acres.
