A US appeals court has upheld a $11m fine made against the parent company of a Cookley wheel manufacturer for selling contaminated buildings to avoid clean-up costs.

Dico, Inc. - a subsidiary of Titan International, which owns Titan Steel Wheels in Bridge Road - owned several buildings in Des Moines, Iowa, contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls - a potential cancer-causing chemical - in the insulation.

In 1994, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered that Dico remove some of the PCB contamination, encapsulate the remaining insulation and submit a long-term maintenance plan for EPA approval.

Without informing the EPA, Dico sold the buildings to Southern Iowa Mechanical (SIM) in 2007 through Titan Tire Corporation - another subsidiary - without divulging that the buildings were contaminated.

SIM tore down the buildings and stored them in an open field, where the EPA later found the toxic chemicals.

The EPA sued Dico to recover damages for its clean-up costs, accusing the company of failing to prevent the additional release of PCBs and for violating the 1994 order.

In 2017, the district court imposed civil penalties and punitive damages and found Dico and Titan liable for $5.4m each in response costs.

Dico and Titan appealed the ruling, arguing that the district court gave insufficient weight to evidence that the transaction was legitimate, gave too much weight to the costs avoided by selling the buildings, and were wrong to award punitive damages.

But the district court insisted that Dico and Titan "knew the buildings would be dismantled once they were sold" and found that the proper disposal of the contaminated insulation would have cost far more than the amount paid for the buildings.

The United States Court of Appeals affirmed the 2017 ruling on Thursday (April 11).

The Shuttle has contacted Titan International for comment.