Largest Portland-based firm mum on sustainability issue

Precision Castparts panned by Newsweek, university institute

By Steve Law

Pamplin Media Group, Nov 12, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / Pamplin Media Group

A flooded lot sits next to Precision Castparts’ sprawling Milwaukie metals plant. Critics say the corporation avoids addressing sustainability, despite being the largest company based in Portland.

Portland prides itself as a green Mecca, but the largest company based in the city – Precision Castparts Corp. – isn’t exactly jumping on the sustainability bandwagon.

Precision Castparts scored a lowly 466th rating in Newsweek magazine’s recent green rankings of the nation’s 500 largest corporations, and the lowest ranking among 21 companies in transportation and aerospace.

Precision Castparts also earned a D-minus grade on environmental issues in a 2009 review by Roberts Environmental Center, a research institute at Claremont McKenna College that analyzes corporate sustainability efforts.

How does the largest company headquartered in one of the nation’s greenest cities respond to this negative publicity?

They’d rather not talk about it.

Corporate spokesman Dwight Weber declined two interview requests, saying the company has no interest in rebutting the Newsweek report and prefers to remain low-key.

“We certainly encourage and strive to do the responsible thing throughout the company,” Weber said in a brief phone message. “We recycle our waxes. We reuse all of our scrap metal, melt it again and put it into other products.”

The company also has taken steps to utilize alternative sources of lighting and power, Weber added. But that was about all he would say.

“We don’t really lead any sustainability efforts out of the corporate office,” Weber said. “That’s done at our plant levels.”

In a followup phone message, Weber denied a reporter’s request to visit any of the company’s local plants or interview on-site staff.

Precision Castparts was founded here in 1953 and has grown to 20,600 employees worldwide, including a modest headquarters in Southwest Portland’s Johns Landing area and a sprawling plant in Milwaukie along Southeast Johnson Creek Boulevard.

It makes metal components and products for the aerospace, energy, defense and other industries, selling to General Electric, Boeing, Rolls Royce and other industrial giants. Spread out at 128 American facilities and 54 overseas sites, Precision Castparts amassed $6.9 billion in sales last year and nearly $1 billion in profits.

Public clueless

Precision Castparts’ annual report discusses its potential liability in seven federally designated Superfund sites, where costly environmental cleanups are expected. It also lists the money set aside to address pollution. But anyone trying to find out about the company’s approach to sustainability, or how it’s bracing for an era of carbon emissions caps, is left clueless by reading the company’s public filings.

“I think it’s fair to say they’re doing a terrible job in their transparency in this arena,” says Emil Murhardt, director of the Roberts Environmental Center and author of the book “Clean, Green and Read All Over: Ten Rules for Effective Corporate Environmental and Sustainability Reporting.”

The Roberts center, part of the prestigious Claremont colleges in the city of Claremont east of Los Angeles, developed its own scoring system to objectively compare company environmental and sustainability programs, as gleaned from company Web sites.

One reason Precision Castparts scored so low in Roberts’ and Newsweek’s assessments is that it reveals so little publicly about its approach, at a time when many large corporations are writing and releasing detailed sustainability reports.

“They really are silent on anything that they’re doing,” says Marlowe Kulley, sustainability adviser for the BEST Business Center in Portland, which stands for Businesses for an Environmentally Sustainable Tomorrow. Funded by local governments and private companies, the center works to improve business practices, and issues awards to exemplary companies.

“It’s clear that their stance is ‘we’re going to be in compliance, but we’re not going to be seen as a leader,’ ” Kulley says.

Wall Street darling

Precision Castparts has been a wild success story business-wise, growing briskly after a stream of buyouts of smaller metals companies. It rocketed to the 362nd largest company on the Fortune 500 this year, only one year after cracking the prestigious list. Oregon is home to only one other Fortune 500 company, Nike, which is headquartered near Beaverton.

Though Precision Castparts sales are down now because of the recession and aerospace industry slump, the company wins plaudits from stock analysts.

“They’re fantastically managed,” says Michael Pierson, a Morningstar Inc. stock analyst in Chicago who tracksaerospace and defense companies. “Their CEO Mark Donegan does a great job, especially with their costs.”

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