The eastern Missouri Ozarks are home to some of the world's largest lead-ore bodies. Lead mining has been ongoing since the French settled in the 1700's, and has left a legacy of contamination. Mining and milling of lead and other heavy metals have contaminated thousands of acres of remote rural Missouri as well of the lands adjacent to the lead smelters in Herculaneum, Buick and Glover. Over the years the many and varied mining companies in Missouri have been consolidated into one large company known as the Doe Run Company. Doe Run is headquartered in St. Louis and owned by North America's largest private polluter, Ira Leon Rennert. Billionaire Rennert lives in a $100 million mansion on Long Island. His Renco Holding company is housed at 33 Rockefeller Center. Through his junk bond strategy he has acquired steel mills, a magnesium company and the Humvee Corporation which makes Hummers for the Defense Department.

In 2003, Doe Run agreed to buy out 160 homes in Herculaneum, Missouri, 30 miles south of St. Louis and home of it's primary lead smelter. National publicity exposed Doe Run's dirty housekeeping at the smelter as well as highly contaminated streets and highways due to the improper hauling of lead concentrate from the mills to the smelter. Street levels of lead were an unheard of 300,000 parts per million. Nearly 1/3 of all dust on the streets was lead and 54% of all children within 3/8 mile of the smelter were lead poisoned!

Doe Run expanded internationally in 1997 and bought the polymetallic smelter in La Oroya, Peru. The first independent blood lead study, performed in 2005 bt the St. Louis Department of Public Health found that virtually all of its inhabitants are lead poisoned, including some 18,000 children. The Blacksmith Institute recently bestowed that city of 30,000 in the Andes as the most polluted city in the Western Hemisphere!

But for starters, you can read this piece by Tom Kruzen.