NL Industries

NL Industries, formerly the National Lead Company, sold Dutch Boy paint sundries, including Synko and Synkoloid patching, spackling and drywall products, in 1972, and in 1971 bought Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. It patented a coating to keep asbestos fibers from becoming airborne. Later asbestos claims tied to its Baroid Division were channeled to the Halliburton (DII Industries) asbestos trust; the library records no bankruptcy of NL Industries itself.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

History

NL Industries was the name the National Lead Company took in 1971. A 1972 catalog page in our library is headed "Dutch Boy Sundry Catalog" and "NL Industries, Inc. Western Region."¹ The 1975 patent gives the assignee's address as Hightstown, New Jersey.³

Products

Pages of its 1972 Dutch Boy catalog in our library list Synkoloid spackling powder, Patch-Rite patching plaster, Synko Triple Duty joint compound and SAF 707 fire-retardant coatings, among other products.¹⁵⁶ The catalog pages describe the products' uses and sizes but do not state what they contain, and no document in our library says these products contained asbestos.¹

What the documents show

A Union Carbide sales report for December and the full year 1971 names NL Industries Inc. among customers for its Calidria asbestos.² In a 1972 letter about a Union Carbide latex for exterior stains, George W. Buttrick wrote that Glidden and NL Industries (East Coast) had objected to the use of asbestos in the semitransparent stain base shown in a proposed Union Carbide bulletin because of health hazards, and asked whether another extender could be substituted.⁷

In August 1973 two New Jersey inventors, Malcolm Kent Smith and Robert Winslow White, filed for a patent assigned to NL Industries on a method of treating asbestos fibers to reduce dust; it was issued on December 23, 1975.³ The patent states that "it has long been recognized that exposure to asbestos fibers of sufficient intensity and long enough duration is causally related to asbestosis, lung cancers, and mesothelioma."³ Asbestos, the industry's trade journal, summarized it in April 1976 as a treatment for Calidria or other chrysotile fibrils.⁸

Asbestos claims and bankruptcy

NL Industries was not itself a debtor in the bankruptcy of DII Industries and other Halliburton subsidiaries, but the plan's asbestos channeling injunction, entered July 16, 2004, listed it as a protected party "solely as it relates to" claims arising out of Baroid-related and bentonite-mining products or operations.⁴ The court explained that DII Industries, now Halliburton, was responsible for only certain asbestos liabilities of NL Industries.⁴ In In re Mid-Valley, Inc. (2014), the estate of a former employee sued NL Industries over work at its Manchester facility in St. Louis in the 1960s; the bankruptcy court held that the injunction protected NL Industries only for the Baroid and Bentone part of such a claim.⁴ Claims of that kind go to the DII Industries asbestos trust.⁹

References

1. Catalog page: Spackling Powder (Synkoloid) (NL Industries) and 3 other products (June 1972)
2. Union Carbide 191: John L. Myers Transmittal of December and Year-End 1971 Calidria Asbestos Sales Report (1972), p. 7
3. Composition and method for inhibiting asbestos fiber dust (US Patent 3,928,060, 1975)
4. In re Mid-Valley, Inc. (Bankr. W.D. Pa. 2014)
5. Catalog page: AD MIX COARSE (Synko Ad-Mix) (NL Industries) and 5 other products (1972)
6. Catalog page: SAF 707 VINYL LATEX (NL Industries) and 2 other products (1972)
7. Union Carbide 207: George W. Buttrick to R. W. Lasher (Jennat) on UCAR 368 Latex Stains (1972)
8. Asbestos, April 1976, p. 51: patents
9. DII Industries (Halliburton, Dresser & Harbison-Walker) Asbestos Trust Claims

Court cases

1 court decision in our case-law library name NL Industries as a defendant.

• In re Mid-Valley, Inc. (2014)

In our library

3 documents in our library name NL Industries, by collection.

Other library documents (3)

• Catalog page: AD MIX COARSE (Synko Ad-Mix) (NL Industries) and 5 other products (1972) (publisher)
• Catalog page: SAF 707 VINYL LATEX (NL Industries) and 2 other products (1972) (publisher)
• Catalog page: Spackling Powder (Synkoloid) (NL Industries) and 3 other products (1972) (publisher)

In the Union Carbide documents

NL Industries is named in 3 Union Carbide documents dated 1972 (3 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• Union Carbide / Jennat UCAR Latex 368 Exterior Stain File: Application Bulletin, Lasher Stain Report, and Buttrick Comments on Asbestos in Stain Formulation (1972) UC-734 (mentioned)
• John L. Myers Transmittal of December and Year-End 1971 Calidria Asbestos Sales Report, with Attached Sales Reports (1972) Union Carbide 191 (mentioned)
• George W. Buttrick to R. W. Lasher (Jennat) on UCAR 368 Latex Stains, with Latex Stains Project Profile (1972) Union Carbide 207 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for NL Industries, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: NL Industries Inc.

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names NL Industries, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.