BANGOR DAILY NEWS • October 11, 2022
A federal judge has signed off on a settlement under which a onetime owner of an Orrington chemical plant will pay almost $200 million to clean up mercury contamination in the Penobscot River. U.S. District Judge John Woodcock Jr. on Tuesday approved a settlement that requires Mallinckrodt U.S. LLC to pay for remediation efforts after the Maine People’s Alliance and Natural Resources Defense Council in 2000 sued the owners of the HoltraChem Manufacturing plant, which sat on the banks of the river. The litigation has been the oldest pending case in Maine’s federal courts. Mallinckrodt was one of a handful of owners of the now defunct HoltraChem plant that produced chlorine bleach for paper mills between 1967 and 2000. A previous court-ordered study found that the plant discharged six to 12 metric tons of mercury into the Penobscot between 1967 and the early 1970s.