Cardno

Cardno Limited
Public
Traded as ASX: CDD
Industry Engineering and professional services consultancy; environmental management; design; project management
Founded 1945
Headquarters Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Key people
 John Marlay (Chairman); Richard Wankmuller (CEO and Managing Director)
Products Services
Revenue A$1,426.90m (June 2015)
Number of employees
 around 8,100 (June 2015)
Slogan "Shaping the Future"
Website www.cardno.com

Cardno is a professional infrastructure and environmental services company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. It is best known for its subsidiary, Cardno ChemRisk, which has been involved in a number of legal cases where it provided scientific consultation to large corporations accused of pollution or violation of other environmental laws.

History

Cardno building, Brisbane.

The original engineering practice from which the Cardno group evolved commenced operations in Brisbane, Queensland in 1945 as Cardno & Davies, founded by engineers Gerry Cardno and Harold Davies.

During the post-war boom years through to the 1970s, Cardno & Davies designed and supervised water supplies, bridges, dams and roads throughout Queensland, as well as sewerage systems in Brisbane and regional towns.

In 1999, Cardno & Davies merged with McMillan, Britton & Kell, a consulting engineering practice based in New South Wales. At this time, the Company was known as Cardno MBK and combined employed around 250 staff.

Cardno Limited listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: CDD) in 2004. At the time of listing, Cardno employed a little over 500 staff.

Today, around 8,100 Cardno staff work in over 250 offices on projects in 100 countries throughout the world.

Cardno ChemRisk

Purchased as a subsidiary in 2012, ChemRisk is best known as a paid scientific consultant to chemical industries. Some of its better-known consultations include Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which was embroiled in the Hinkley groundwater contamination case that made Erin Brockovich famous. According to a Wall Street Journal account, ChemRisk paid a scientist who had previously published the health risks of chromium to retract his story.[1] A subsequent Chicago Tribune report discussed evidence that Dennis Paustenbach, the founder of ChemRisk, "grossly distorted" the usefulness of chemical retardants in furniture.[2] More recently, ChemRisk was accused in a Huffington Post opinion piece of minimizing the health impacts of chemicals released by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill while working as a consultant for British Petroleum[3] and has since undertaken a lawsuit against the authors of the opinion piece, denying that this suit was a Strategic lawsuit against public participation.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Waldman, Peter (June 2, 2006). "Publication to Retract An Influential Water Study". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  2. ↑ Roe, Sam. "Distorting science". Chicago Tribune (May 9, 2012). Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  3. ↑ Foytlin, Cherri (October 14, 2013). "ChemRisk, BP and Purple Strategies: A Tangled Web of Not-So-Independent Science". Huffington Post. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  4. ↑ Meier, Barry (October 11, 2105). "Science Consultant Pushes Back Against Unlikely Opponents". New York Times. Retrieved 12 October 2015. Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, April 30, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.