Type Private Founded 1842 | Headquarters Michigan, United States | |
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Founder Edgar and Stephen J. Conkling Parent organization EaglePicher Holdings, Inc. | ||
Eagle-Picher Corporation (now reduced to EaglePicher Technologies) is a privately held, American, manufacturing and resource extractive company known for its storage battery technology. It was founded in 1842 as a paint manufacturing firm using the name Eagle White Lead, and became Eagle-Picher Lead in 1916 with its merger with a lead mining company owned by Oliver Picher. That merger made it the second largest producer of lead and zinc products in the world. It has had many subsidiaries including the Eagle-Picher Mining & Smelting Company (now EP Minerals), Eagle-Picher Industries, EaglePicher Technologies, EaglePicher Commercial Power Solutions, and Wolverine Advanced Materials. Eagle-Picher was one of the defendants in the asbestos litigation, and has twice been through bankruptcy reorganization. After numerous divestitures, the remaining core company EaglePicher Technologies was sold to OM Group Inc. in 2010.
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History
In 1842, Edgar and Stephen J. Conkling, brothers, started a firm in Cincinnati, Ohio to manufacture pigments for commercial paints. They called the partnership the E. & S. J. Conkling Company and used the brand name Eagle White Lead. In 1847, with Stephen out of the picture, Edgar took a new partner, William Wood, and the partnership became Conkling Wood & Company. After the American Civil War the firm was incorporated with William Wood as the majority stockholder. In 1916, the Picher Lead Company of Missouri merged with the Eagle White Lead to form Eagle-Picher Lead.
During World War II, Eagle-Picher used diatomaceous earth and zinc to produce storage batteries for the US military. By 1947 they were among the first to adapt a purification system for Germanium for commercial use in the transistor industry.
From 1964 until 1976 Eagle-Picher operated a printed circuit board manufacturing plant in Socorro County, New Mexico and dumped industrial waste into unlined sewage lagoons. Then from 1980 to 1989 they dumped industrial waste from the manufacture of non-automotive lead-acid batteries into those same lagoons. The hazardous chemicals, including a number of organochlorides, permeated into the local drinking water supply, and the site became a Superfund site. Eagle-Picher operated a number of lead smelters which contaminated the local areas and ended up as Superfund sites. The one in Hillsboro, Illinois was placed on the Superfund list in September 2007. Clean-up of the smelter in northwestern Joplin, Missouri was begun in the late 1990s, but was still on-going as of 2008. The Eagle-Picher smelter in Henryetta, Oklahoma was cleaned up in the late 1990s.
In January 1991 Eagle-Picher filed for bankruptcy protection having over $2.5 billion in asbestos-related claims asserted against it, as well as other environmental claims. Its reorganization was approved in November 1996 with the ownership of the company going to a trust for victims of asbestos and lead poisoning. In 1998 the trust sold the operating businesses to Granaria Holdings, a consortium of Dutch investors. In 2000, the company sold its last company (subsidiary) that operated in the Cincinnati area, Cincinnati Industrial Machinery, to Armor Metal Group. In 2002, corporate headquarters were relocated from Cincinnati to Phoenix, Arizona.
In April 2005, Eagle-Picher filed for bankruptcy protection a second time, having accumulated more than $500 million in new debt. It did not fully exit Chapter 11 reorganization until July 2009. During its reorganization, Eagle-Picher acquired new owners, restructured, moved its corporate headquarters in Michigan, and divested itself of some of its non-core businesses. In 2007, it sold its pharmaceutical division to Aptuit Inc. and its EP Boron subsidiary to Ceradyne. In 2008, Eagle-Picher sold Hillsdale Automotive (Metavation) to Cerion. In 2009 two principal new owners became Angelo, Gordon & Co., a New York investment firm, and Tennenbaum Capital Partners, a California investment firm. The owners constituted the EPMC Holdings Corp. In February 2010 Eagle-Picher Corp. sold EaglePicher Technologies, their battery division, and EaglePicher Medical Power to OM Group, Inc., a chemical and metals firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. As a result, Eagle-Picher Corp. subsequently changed its name to EP Management. In December EP Management then sold Wolverine Advanced Materials to Wynnchurch Capital. In 2011, EPMC Holdings Corp. sold both EP Management and EP Minerals (formerly Eagle-Picher Minerals) to Gate Capital Corp. of San Francisco.
The name Eagle-Picher belongs to EaglePicher Technologies and its parent OM Group Inc. EaglePicher Technologies continues to make batteries.