BOISE, ID--(Marketwired - Apr 7, 2014) - US Ecology, Inc. (NASDAQ: ECOL) ("the Company") today announced that it has entered into a definitive stock purchase agreement to acquire EQ - The Environmental Quality Company ("EQ"), a fully-integrated environmental services and waste management company based in Wayne, Michigan, with facilities throughout the Eastern United States. EQ is owned by an affiliate of New York based private equity fund Kinderhook Industries, LLC. The transaction, valued at $465 million, is expected to close in the second or third quarter of 2014 and is subject to customary closing conditions, and a purchase price adjustment based on working capital. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to adjusted earnings per share for the full year 2014.

 

 

Tesla Motors Inc., the electric vehicle maker co-founded by Elon Musk, plans to use only raw materials sourced in North America for its proposed $5 billion U.S. battery factory.

 

The Silicon Valley company won’t look overseas for the graphite, cobalt and other materials needed for its so-called Gigafactory, said Liz Jarvis-Shean, a spokeswoman.

 

“It will enable us to establish a supply chain that is local and focused on minimizing environmental impact while significantly reducing battery cost,” she said in an email.

 

The move comes amid heightened interest in curbing graphite pollution and a widespread corporate sensitivity about avoiding the use of industrial minerals from global trouble spots such as central Africa. China’s government, for example, has begun to shutter mines producing graphite, a major ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, over air-quality issues, Bloomberg News reported March 14.

 

 

Brazilian judges ordered a criminal prosecution of Chevron Corp. and 11 employees over an oil spill in Nov. 2011, in a process reinstated more than a year after being thrown out following a settlement with the government.

 

An appeals panel made the 2-to-1 decision in October, but kept it quiet as judges reviewed Chevron's challenges to their ruling, Brazil's public prosecutor's office, which oppposed the dismissal, said on Wednesday.

 

Chevron confirmed the ruling late on Thursday.

 

The case is likely to revive concern over the speed and security of Brazilian legal rulings.

 

March 26, 2014

Obvious oil spills, like the 168,000 gallons (635,000 liters) of oil that leaked into Galveston Bay on Saturday, usually make national news, accompanied by pictures of oil-blackened wildlife.

 

But such publicized events account for only a small part of the total amount of oil pollution in the oceans—and many of the other sources, such as automobile oil, go largely unnoticed, scientists say.

 

In fact, of the tens of millions of gallons of oil that enter North American oceans each year due to human activities, only 8 percent comes from tanker or oil pipeline spills, according to the 2003 book Oil in the Sea III by the U.S. National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, which is still considered the authority on oil-spill data.