CSR Limited

Australian building products company

CSR Limited is a major Australian industrial company, producing building products and having a 25% share in the Tomago aluminium smelter located near Newcastle, New South Wales. It is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange. In 2021, it had over 3,000 employees and reported an after tax profit of $146 million. The company has a diversified shareholding, with predominantly Australian fund managers and retail owners. The group's corporate headquarters is in North Ryde, Sydney. Founded in Sydney in 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company at the Old Sugarmill, the company expanded into milling cane in Queensland and Fiji from the 1870s. It quickly became the most important miller and refiner in Australasia, with a virtual monopoly on Queensland and Fiji sugar production up to, respectively, 1989 and 1972. It also sold by products of the sugar industry, from molasses to ethanol. In 2010, CSR sold its sugar and ethanol business, which had been given the name Sucrogen in 2009, to the Singaporean company Wilmar. As of 2015, the business is known as Wilmar Sugar. The company began to diversify into building products as early as 1942, with the construction of a plaster mill in Sydney, and in 1947 the company began manufacturing plasterboard. It acquired Bradford Insulation in 1959, which produced heat insulation materials for buildings, and currently has a substantial share of the insulation market in Australia and Asia. The company also produces fibre cement sheeting, aerated concrete products, bricks, permanent formwork for walls and systems to support plasterboard construction through Rondo, a joint venture with Boral. It spun off its interests in heavy building products to a separate listed company, Rinker Group, in 2003. In 2007, CSR established the Viridian glass company which it sold in 2019. In 2024, French multinational Saint Gobain agreed to acquire CSR for billion ($2.95billion).

Founded in Sydney by Edward Knox in 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the company first began refining imported raw sugar at its refineries in Canterbury then Chippendale. CSR expanded into the Melbourne market in 1857 with the purchase of a refinery at Sandridge through its associate company, the Victoria Sugar Company. These operations were later moved to refineries at Pyrmont and Yarraville.

In 1880, Knox handed over the management of CSR to his second son Edward William Knox who immediately began a rapid expansion of the company's operations into Queensland and Fiji. E. W. Knox oversaw the transition of the company into owning and running large sugar plantations in these regions which were serviced on site by high capacity mills also owned by CSR. The two major CSR plantations created at this time were the Victoria Plantation and the Homebush Plantation. Blackbirded South Sea Islander labour was utilised by CSR to deforest the land, plant and cut the sugarcane, and build the mills. Knox and the company's Queensland director E. B. Forrest chartered blackbirding vessels to bring Islanders to the plantations. The 1884 recruiting voyage of Hopeful blackbirding labour vessel which kidnapped and murdered many Islanders was under contract to deliver labourers to Ebenezer Cowley, manager of the Victoria Plantation. An 1886 inquiry into this type of labour found that up to 60% of the Islanders transported to the Homebush Plantation had died within four years. The kidnapping and deaths of these workers resulted in 111 Islanders being removed from the CSR plantations by the Queensland government and returned to their homelands in 1885. CSR was compensated £4,424 by the government for the loss of these labourers. CSR also experimented with cheap Chinese, Javanese, Singhalese and Japanese coolie labour on their plantations. Local laws made it harder to use blackbirded Melanesian labour and CSR soon turned to Indian coolie labour imported from Calcutta. By 1885, most of CSR's Fijian plantation workforce were coolies on 5 year contracts.

CSR constructed further large refineries and mills in Australasia including the Chelsea Sugar Refinery built near Auckland in 1884, a large refining complex at Glanville, Adelaide in 1891 to process sugar from Mauritius, and the massive sugar mill at Lautoka in 1903.

In February 1980, CSR acquired construction and mining contractor Thiess in a hostile takeover. In April 1981, the construction division was sold to a consortium of Hochtief, Westfield Group and Leslie Thiess.

Between 1948 and 1966, CSR operated mines at Wittenoom, Western Australia that produced 161,000 tons of crocidolite fibre. During this time, thousands of workers and their families, visitors, tourists, consultants and government officials were exposed to potentially lethal levels of blue asbestos almost a thousand times higher than occupationally regulated at the time. Many of them would develop fatal diseases due to this, such as pleural mesothelioma and lung cancer. Despite warnings from the Western Australia Health Department and other health authorities in the early 1960s, CSR continued to operate the mine until 1966. The first court victory for the Wittenoom victims was in 1988, when Klaus Rabenault won his case against Midalco, a subsidiary of CSR that ran the mines. The judge ruled that CSR acted with 'continuing, conscious and contumelious' disregard for its workers' safety and that Rabenault should be awarded $426,000 by way of compensation and $250,000 in punitive damages. It is predicted that by 2020, almost a third of the people who passed through Wittenoom during the mines' operating years would be diagnosed with a fatal disease caused by their dangerous exposures to blue asbestos. This would be an estimated 2,000 cases totalling costs of A$500 million in damages from CSR. In the 1980s CSR was pursued by victims of asbestosis caused by the operation of its Midalco subsidiary in Western Australia. By 1988, 258 damage related suits had been taken against CSR, though only a handful of cases had been heard in the courts. In May that year a Victorian court made an award of A$680,000 against Midalco to a former worker, after he contracted the fatal lung cancer, mesothelioma; and in August, lesser amounts were awarded to other workers, against CSR itself (22). Finally in 1989 and the following year, a settlement was made. Meanwhile, CSR and the State Government Insurance Commission of Western Australia were engaged in a dispute as to which of them was responsible for payment of the damages to the workforce and their dependents, with CSR arguing that it was not responsible for liabilities sustained by its Midalco subsidiary. The two bodies finally reached agreement in early 1989 to share the costs of compensation (23). Fifteen million dollars would be paid out by each of them to cover damages for the seven year period of operation of the Wittenoom mine, with an additional total of A$20 million payable to claimants who worked there before 1959 (23). By the end of that year, researchers at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre, and the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, in Perth had estimated that a further 692 workers would fall victim to mesothelioma with another 183 cases of lung cancer to be expected. They predicted another 432 successful claims would be made, in addition to the 356 already accepted (24). At the beginning of 1990, 322 workers had been compensated (25). A few months later CSR made a partial re entry into mining, when it bought up 48 quarries from the US ARC subsidiary of the British Hanson corporation. It also pulled out of a plasterboard joint venture with Redland Plasterboard (established in 1987) while retaining its Australian and New Zealand interests, through Monier PGH—a company with around half of the Australian roofing tile market (26). The mining and milling of blue asbestos at Wittenoom is as of 2004 the greatest single industrial disaster in Australia's history. The song "Blue Sky Mine" by Australian rock band Midnight Oil is about the disaster.