Customer Corner : Teck Resources Ltd – Cummins’ Favourite Mine Mate With Poison In The Water

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Let’s get one thing straight before Teck’s PR department starts polishing the copper halo. Cummins itself has publicly showcased Teck as a mining customer, boasting about 111 Komatsu 930E haul trucks, mostly powered by Cummins QSK60 engines, grinding away at Teck’s steelmaking coal operations in Canada. Cummins says the happy little partnership doubled engine life over time and saved Teck more than $3.5 million. Lovely. Heavy haul trucks, longer engine life, fatter margins, mutual back-slapping. The sort of case study Cummins loves because it turns extraction into a spreadsheet romance. The problem is that once you step away from the glossy maintenance gospel and look at the company behind it, Teck starts reading less like a mining champion and more like a long, expensive argument with rivers, fish, regulators and anybody unlucky enough to live downstream. Another filthy exhibit in the Cummins customer ecosystem, and another reminder that Cummins never seems to struggle when it comes to finding clients with muck on their boots and a ledger full of grief.

Cummins Has Been Proud To Ride With Teck

There is no point being shy about the relationship. Cummins was not dragged into Teck by accident, nor did a few spare parts quietly end up in a distant corner of a mine site where nobody noticed.

Cummins wrote the damn case study.

It proudly described Teck’s fleet of 111 Komatsu 930E haul trucks, mostly fitted with QSK60 engines, working across three steelmaking coal operations in Canada. It hailed data-driven maintenance, longer engine life, fewer annual replacements and millions saved. That is not a casual supplier relationship. That is Cummins standing on the bonnet, waving the brochure and telling the world how nicely the partnership performs when the mine is chewing hard enough.

And that matters, because Teck is not some innocent customer with a single ugly chapter and a lot of misunderstood intentions. It is a company with a habit of turning up wherever you find long-term contamination, regulatory pain and the sort of official language that tries to make polluted water sound like an administrative inconvenience.

The Columbia River Never Forgot

Start in Trail, British Columbia, where Teck Metals has spent years trying not to look too haunted by the Upper Columbia.

Washington State’s Department of Ecology says Teck discharged nearly 10 million tons of toxic waste into the Upper Columbia River. The long fight that followed ended with the U.S. Supreme Court leaving in place a Ninth Circuit ruling that held Teck liable and left an award of more than $8 million in costs to the Colville Tribes standing. Washington Ecology did not mince words. It said the company had disposed of millions of tons of waste into the river over decades, including metals such as arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc.

That is not some tiny historical boo-boo buried in the distant archives. That is a century’s worth of industrial contempt sluiced down a river and into other people’s lives.

And then, because old habits apparently die like poisoned fish, Teck Metals was ordered in 2023 to pay a C$2.2 million fine after pleading guilty to unlawfully depositing effluent into the Columbia River in 2019. The Canadian government said the company discharged effluent with pH levels outside authorised limits from one of its outfalls into fish-bearing waters.

So there you have it. The old river fight never really ended. It just acquired new paperwork.

Elk Valley Is The Gift That Keeps Poisoning

If the Columbia story is the old wound, Elk Valley is the one still weeping through the bandages.

This is where selenium and nitrate leach out of piles of waste rock and march downstream through one of the most contaminated coal-mining watersheds in North America. Teck’s own documents have acknowledged that waste rock placed decades ago continues to release selenium and is expected to keep doing so for many decades more. Selenium, in case anyone needs a refresher, can cause fish deformities, failed eggs and all the other grotesque little warnings nature tends to offer before a company starts pretending the problem is manageable.

In 2021, Teck Coal pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay C$60 million under the Fisheries Act for depositing harmful substances into waters frequented by fish from its Fording River and Greenhills operations. The federal government called it the largest ever fine under that Act at the time and paired it with a direction requiring new pollution-reduction measures.

Then, because apparently one giant fine was not enough to sharpen anyone’s memory, Canada laid five Fisheries Act charges against Teck Coal in July 2024 over alleged harmful deposits into Dry Creek and the Fording River from Line Creek Operations. Those charges have not been proven. So let’s keep the lawyers calm and call them what they are: allegations, still before the court.

But whether the latest charges stick or not, the broader picture is already ugly enough without embellishment. The valley has been carrying this burden for years, and even the clean-up arithmetic has started to look like a horror story. A 2024 report covered by The Narwhal estimated it could cost C$6.4 billion just to treat selenium-contaminated water in the Elk Valley, far above the province’s current secured amounts.

That is not remediation. That is a future taxpayer nightmare waiting in a reflective vest.

Quebrada Blanca And Red Dog Keep The Pattern Moving

The nice thing about Teck, if you are writing a hit piece, is that the grief does not stay politely in one jurisdiction.

In Chile, Teck’s Quebrada Blanca mine was hit with environmental charges in 2022, including several classed as serious, according to Mining.com’s report on Chilean regulator action. Not the strongest lane in this file, but enough to show the company’s appetite for environmental headaches is not limited to Canada.

And up in Alaska, the EPA announced in 2024 that Teck Alaska paid a $429,794 penalty over hazardous-waste violations at the Red Dog Mine. The agency said Teck failed for more than four years to make proper hazardous-waste determinations and failed to ensure proper management of hazardous waste.

Different continent. Different regulator. Same old funeral music.

That is the thing about companies like Teck. The scenery changes. The legal stationery changes. The accents change. The basic story stays stubbornly familiar.

This Is What Cummins Counts As A Good Customer

That is why Teck belongs in Customer Corner.

Because Cummins did not accidentally graze against this company in a supply chain fog. It celebrated Teck. It used Teck’s coal-haul fleet to tell a story about reliability, productivity and asset life. It turned Teck into a testimonial for engine performance while the company itself kept surfacing in stories about toxic waste, polluted rivers, Fisheries Act fines, unproven but serious new charges, and billion-dollar clean-up fears.

No, Cummins did not create Teck’s mess.

That is not the point.

The point is that Cummins keeps finding itself proudly bolted into outfits like this. Heavy metal. Heavy extraction. Heavy public consequences. Then comes the case study, with the profits smiling in one column while the poisoned water keeps moving in another.

The engines keep running.
The haul trucks keep climbing.
The ore keeps leaving.
And somewhere downstream, somebody else keeps paying.

That is the Cummins customer ecosystem in miniature. Not clean industry. Not responsible progress. Just another profitable marriage between horsepower and harm, dressed up in efficiency language and left to idle while the river carries the evidence away.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

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