"A Natural Zink: The Business History of a Fjord and the Environmental History of a Zink Smelter"

This paper proposes to add to our understanding of corporate environmentalism (Rome 2019, 2021) and the environmental history of businesses (Bergquist 2019) by enriching business history with theoretical approaches from the history of technology and environmental history. The concepts environing (Sörlin & Warde 2009) and environing technologies (Sörlin & Wormbs 2018) have been used by environmental historians and historians of technology to analyze how the natural and built environment has been both shaped and understood by means of a variety of tools and techniques. Using a zink smelter located on the shores of a Western Norwegian fjord as a case, this paper introduces this approach to business history by analysing how the factory’s managers, workers and a variety of stakeholders both altered the chemical composition of the fjord and reformulated the fjord’s relevance as a natural and post-natural environment in the second half of the 20th century.