TL;DR
- The U.S. Department of Justice and the State of Montana are suing Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, LLC (a subsidiary of the commodities trading giant Glencore who may or may not be my employer) over a Superfund site outside Columbia Falls, Montana, where an aluminum plant ran for 54 years and left cyanide and fluoride-laced waste behind.
- Federal and state regulators have gone on the record: the site poses “an imminent and substantial endangerment” to public health, safety, and the environment.
- The plant discharged wastewater into groundwater under state permits for decades, and contaminated sediment threatened to erode into the Flathead River until an emergency removal action in 2020 and 2021.
- Taxpayers, not the company, have been fronting the cleanup response costs for years. The lawsuit is the government’s attempt to get some of that money back.
- The case was filed July 2, 2026, seventy years after the plant first opened its potlines.
Keep reading to see exactly how many landfills of cyanide-laced waste sit on the 1,340-acre site the company is now being sued over.
The Receipts: What the Complaint Says in Black and White
These are not activist talking points. They come straight from the federal complaint filed against the company.
“EPA and MDEQ have determined that there is or may be an imminent and substantial endangerment to the public health or welfare or the environment because of actual and threatened releases of hazardous substances into the environment at and from the Site.” Paragraph 39, United States and State of Montana v. Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, LLC
- This is the government’s own official finding, not outside speculation: two separate agencies concluded the site could endanger the public right now.
- The word “imminent” is a specific legal trigger under federal Superfund law that authorizes emergency intervention, not a routine paperwork violation.
“Primary products and wastes from activities at the Site included spent potliner material, which contained fluoride, sodium, aluminum, and cyanide.” Paragraph 12, United States and State of Montana v. Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, LLC
- Cyanide, a lethal poison, was a documented byproduct of routine plant operations, not an accident or a one-time spill.
- This waste characterization is what qualifies the site for federal Superfund regulation in the first place.
“The selected remedy applies a strategy that emphasizes sitewide consolidation and encapsulation of contaminant sources to eliminate exposure pathways, reduces the transfer of contaminants of concern to groundwater, and prevents contaminant migration to the Flathead River.” Paragraph 28, United States and State of Montana v. Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, LLC
- The plan is to bury and seal the contamination in place. That is containment, not full removal of the waste.
- Naming the Flathead River specifically shows regulators see a live threat of the contamination spreading beyond the plant’s boundary.
Who Gets Hurt: Public Health and the Land
Public Health: What Regulators Are Admitting
This case centers on chemicals that don’t stay where you put them. Regulators have already gone on record about what that means for anyone living near the plant.
- Spent potliner waste from the plant’s operations contained cyanide, fluoride, sodium, and aluminum, generated as a normal byproduct of aluminum smelting.
- Wet scrubbers meant to control particulate fluoride air pollution only operated until the 1990s, leaving decades of the plant’s history with less air pollution control.
- Wastewater was discharged indirectly into groundwater under state-issued permits from the plant’s early years until it closed in 2009.
- EPA and Montana’s environmental regulator jointly determined the site poses an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health, safety, and welfare.
The Land, the Water, the Eight Landfills
The contamination did not stay confined to plant property. It spread across a 1,340-acre stretch of land bordered by a reservoir, a mountain, and a major river.
- The Site includes eight landfills, seven closed and one still open, plus leachate ponds and percolation ponds built to hold plant waste.
- Contaminated sediment in the South Percolation Ponds threatened to erode into the Flathead River, forcing an emergency removal action the company completed in May 2021.
- The Site sits between Cedar Creek Reservoir, Teakettle Mountain, the Flathead River, and Cedar Creek, putting multiple waterways within reach of the contamination.
- EPA placed the Site on the National Priorities List, the federal registry reserved for the country’s most contaminated locations, in September 2016.
Who Pays? Following the Cost
Before a single dollar comes out of the company’s pocket, someone else has already been paying.
- The United States government has incurred, and will continue to incur, response costs investigating and addressing the contamination at the Site.
- The State of Montana has incurred, and will continue to incur, its own remedial action costs responding to the same contamination.
- The lawsuit exists because the public has already fronted money the company was legally responsible for. The government is now in court trying to get it back.
This Is the System Working as Intended
Nothing about this case required a scandal or a whistleblower to unfold the way it did. The gap between when the plant started generating cyanide waste and when the government finally sued over it tells its own story.
70 years
from first operation in 1955 to the final cleanup plan in 2025 (calculated from source figures)
Harm Timeline vs. Regulatory Timeline
What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like
This case shows what happens when cleanup law depends on years of process before a company is forced to pay: the public carries the cost in the meantime.
Regulatory Track
- Require EPA to conduct automatic Superfund eligibility screening within a fixed window after a hazardous-waste-generating facility like this one closes, rather than the seven years it took here between the 2009 closure and the 2016 National Priorities Listing (calculated from source figures).
- Tighten groundwater discharge permitting for facilities producing cyanide and fluoride waste, given that this plant discharged wastewater into groundwater under state permits for decades.
- General industry standard: mandate third-party audits of active discharge permits for hazardous-waste generators on a fixed schedule, rather than relying solely on the permit holder’s own reporting.
Legislative Track
- Shorten the statutory window between a Proposed Plan and a final Record of Decision, since this process ran from June 2023 to January 2025, roughly a year and a half (calculated from source figures).
- Codify a fixed deadline requiring EPA to move from National Priorities Listing to final remedy selection, since that step took nearly nine years in this case (calculated from source figures).
- General industry standard: require corporations that acquire facilities with unresolved environmental liabilities to post cleanup bonds at the time of acquisition.
Corporate Governance Track
- General industry standard: require standing board-level oversight of long-tail environmental liabilities, since contamination like this can outlast the executives who oversaw the operations that caused it.
- General industry standard: tie any executive compensation or exit packages at a successor company to unresolved cleanup obligations inherited from a predecessor’s operations, relevant here given the defendant’s status as legal successor to Columbia Falls Aluminum Company.
- General industry standard: require public disclosure of financial reserves set aside for known Superfund liabilities in corporate filings.
What Now?
Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, LLC is now the named defendant in federal court over this site. Here is who is tracking it, and how you can too.
- EPA: the federal agency that placed the Site on the National Priorities List and selected the cleanup remedy.
- Montana Department of Environmental Quality: the state agency co-litigating the case and overseeing remedial action costs.
- U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division: the federal office prosecuting the cost-recovery case in court.
- Track Case No. 9:26-cv-00099-KLD in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, Missoula Division, for updates on whether the company is made to pay.
- Contact Montana DEQ directly to ask what independent water and soil monitoring is happening in the Flathead River watershed while the case proceeds.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
Click on this link please for the EPA page on this environmental pollution
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