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From Knowmore.org

Corporate Statistics

This company has areas of concern around Worker Rights, Human Rights, Political Influence, Environmental Issues, and Business Ethics. KnowMore Users are urged to boycott this company.

The Dow Chemical Company

2030 Dow Center Midland MI USA
48674
989-636-1000
http://www.dow.com/

Type:

Public

[edit] Criticism

On the morning after the Bhopal disaster, press photographers Raghu Rai and Pablo Bartholomew came upon this man, burying his baby daughter. As Raghu relates, the father had covered the child's head with earth, then, unable to bear the thought of never seeing her again, brushed away the dirt for one last look. The photographers too were crying. The terrible but tender picture of the child's burial has become the most famous icon of the Bhopal disaster.

[edit] Human Rights / Environmental Disasters

Dow has one of the worst environmental legacies of any major company, encompassing Agent Orange, Asbestos, Dioxin, Dursban, DDT, Nemagon and Napalm.

But Dow wasn't the uncontested world leader in industrial accidents until they bought Union Carbide in 2001, and with it the legacy of the Bhopal catastrophe.

[edit] Bhopal Disaster

The Bhopal Disaster of 1984 was the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world. It was caused by the accidental release of forty metric tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) from a Union Carbide India, Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant located in the heart of the city of Bhopal, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. UCIL was a joint venture between Union Carbide and a public/private consortium of Indian investors.

The MIC leak killed thousands outright and injured anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 others, at least 15,000 of whom died later from their injuries. Some sources give much higher fatality figures.

A November 2004 BBC investigation confirmed that the contamination is still active.

[edit] Factors Leading to the Disaster

The Union Carbide plant had been established in 1969 and had expanded to produce carbaryl in 1979; MIC is an intermediate in carbaryl manufacture.

The chemical accident was caused by the introduction of water into MIC holding tanks. The resulting reaction generated many large surges of toxic gas, forcing the emergency release of pressure. The gas escaped while the chemical 'scrubbers' which should have treated the gas were off-line for repairs. Investigations have revealed that several other safety procedures were bypassed (baffle plates to prevent water leaking into the tanks were omitted; tank refrigeration was offline; the flare tower that could burn off escaping gas was offline) and the standard of operations in the Indian plant did not match those at other Union Carbide plants. It was also alleged that these safety procedures were wilfully toned down as a part of "cost cutting operations" at the Indian plant that Union Carbide was involved in at that time. Recent documents, obtained through discovery in the course of a lawsuit against Union Carbide for environmental contamination before a New York Federal District revealed that Carbide had exported "untested, unproven technology" to the Indian plant. After the release, the local doctors were not informed of the nature of the gas, thus hampering treatment, and basic disaster management measures (such as blocking all gaps with wet towels) were not planned for.

Union Carbide denies these allegations on its website dedicated to the tragedy. It cites a non-peer-reviewed investigation that concluded that a single employee secretly and deliberately introduced a large amount of water into the MIC tank by removing a meter and connecting a water hose directly to the tank through the metering port. Carbide claims such a large amount of water could not have found its way into the tank by accident, and safety systems were not designed to deal with intentional sabotage. UC says that the rest of the plant staff falsified numerous records to distance themselves from the incident, and that the Indian Government impeded its investigation and declined to prosecute the employee responsible, presumably because that would weaken its allegations of negligence against Union Carbide. Union Carbide has never publicly named or identified the employee it claims sabotaged its Bhopal plant.

The majority of deaths and serious injuries were related to pulmonary oedemas, but the gas caused a wide variety of other ailments.

[edit] Investigation and Legal Action Against Union Carbide

In an out-of-court settlement reached on February 14, 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay USD $470 million for damages it caused in the Bhopal disaster. (The original lawsuit was for USD 3 billion.)

The CEO of Union Carbide at that time, Warren Anderson, who had retired by 1986, was declared a fugitive from law by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal on February 1, 1992 for failing to appear at the court hearings in a culpable homicide case in which he was named the chief defendant. Orders were passed to the Government of India to press for an extradition from the United States, with whom India had an extradition treaty in place. However, the demanded extradition never materialized. Many activists allege that the Indian government has hesitated to put forth a strong case of extradition to the United States, fearing backlash from foreign investors who have become more important players in the Indian economy following liberalization. A seemingly apathetic attitude from the US government, which has failed to pursue the case, has also led to strong protests in the past, most notably by Greenpeace.

A plea by India's Central Bureau of Investigation to dilute the charges from culpable homicide to criminal negligence has since been dismissed by the Indian courts. To date, Anderson is still an absconder before the Indian courts and faces charges that if proven may result in imprisonment of up to 10 years.

Meanwhile, very little of the money from the settlement reached with Union Carbide went to the survivors, and people in the area feel betrayed not only by Union Carbide (and chairman Warren Anderson), but also by their own politicians. On the anniversary of the tragedy, effigies of Anderson and politicians are burnt. In July 2004, the Indian Supreme Court ordered the government to pay to victims, and families of the dead, the US$330 million remaining in the compensation fund.

Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary, which had operated the Bhopal plant, to an Indian battery manufacturer in 1994. The Dow Chemical Company purchased Union Carbide in 2001 for $10.3 billion in stock and debt. Dow has publicly stated several times that the Union Carbide settlement payments have already fulfilled Dow's financial responsibility for the disaster.

[edit] Ongoing Contamination

Ownership issues have led to a stalemate on the issue of cleaning up the plant and its environs of hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste, which has been left untouched. Environmentalists have warned that the waste is a potential minefield in the heart of the city, and the resulting contamination may lead to decades of slow poisoning, and diseases affecting the nervous system, liver and kidneys in humans. Studies have shown that the rates of cancer and other ailments are higher in the region since the event. Activists have demanded that Dow clean up this toxic waste, and have pressed the government of India to demand more money from Dow.

In an investigation broadcast on BBC Radio 5 on November 14, 2004, it was reported that the site is still contaminated with 'thousands' of metric tons of toxic chemicals, including benzene hexachloride and mercury, held in open containers or loose on the ground. Some areas are reportedly so polluted that anyone entering the area for more than ten minutes is likely to lose consciousness. Rainfall causes run-off, polluting local wells and boreholes, and the results of tests undertaken on behalf of the BBC by accredited water analysis laboratories in the United Kingdom reveal pollution levels in borehole water 500 times the legal maximum in that country. Statistical surveys of local residents, with a control population in a similarly poor area away from the plant, are reported to reveal higher levels of various diseases around the plant.

The following is reprinted from Bhopal.net:

Most people, when they think of Bhopal, recall only the horrors of 'that night', when gas leaked from the Union Carbide factory and killed thousands. What is not generally known is that the poor of Bhopal have suffered a second disaster which is still injuring and killing them to this day. The cause? The same killer factory.

After the gas leak, Union Carbide's factory was closed and for all practical purposes abandoned by the company. To this day you can see piles of dangerous chemicals lying in the open air. The warehouses are full of sacks of poisons, many of which have split open. Children and animals have been in and left footprints in the chemical dust. The structures and buildings on the site have been left to rot.

The monsoons of two decades have washed the chemicals deep into the soil and into the underground acquifers which feed wells and boreholes. The drinking wells and tap of communities living within a considerable radius of the plant have been contaminated with chemicals that are implicated in cancers and birth-defects. People have no other water supply and have been forced to drink and wash in Union Carbide's diluted poisons. 20,000 people are affected.

The French writer Dominique Lapierre, author of Five to Midnight in Bhopal wrote in 2002:

I wanted to reckon the aggressiveness of this pollution by drinking half a glass of the water of one of those wells. My mouth, my throat, my tongue instantly got on fire, while my arms and legs suffered an immediate skin rash. This was the simple manifestation of what men, women and children have to endure daily, some eighteen years after the tragedy. (Read Dominique's article in English

People meanwhile are ill from the water. In many cases these are the same families who were decimated by the gas in 1984. A whole new generation is being poisoned. People complain of aches and pains, rashes, fevers, eruptions of boils and other skin complaints, headaches, nausea, lack of appetite, dizziness, constant exhaustion. Lead, mercury and organochlorines have been found in the milk of nursing mothers living near the factory with the result that women are terrified to breast-feed their babies because they are feeding them poison.

This poisoning has been going on for decades. The first signs appeared in the early 80s, before the gas leak, when animals grazing near the factory became ill and died. The complaints of their owners were settled out-of-court. The company continually denied that the factory was contaminated or was responsible for polluting water, but it is clear from internal Carbide documents obtained via "discovery" in the New York court case (see below) that it had carried out tests and knew as long ago as 1989 that soil and water within its boundaries were lethal. It chose not to make this knowledge public, instead continuing to deny that any danger existed.

It was not until 1999, ten years later, that the first systematic study of the contamination was carried out by Greenpeace. Samples of soil and water were analysed at labs in the UK. In some places levels of mercury were six million times higher than expected. Local drinking water was found to be heavily laced with cancer- and birth defect-causing chemicals. You will find the Greenpeace report here. Scroll down for more articles and resources.

Survivors' organisations have fought back, demanding that clean safe water be piped to the affected communities, that the factory site be decontaminated and the toxins lying there removed, that Union Carbide which abandoned the plant knowing full well the dangers of what it had left behind, should pay for the medical treatment of those who are ill for as long as the illness lasts and that families should be compensated for their years of ill health and loss of earnings.

Union Carbide, which is now a 100%-owned subsidiary of Dow Chemicals refuses to clean up the plant or accept responsibility for the damage it has caused to people's health and livelihoods. It maintains that the state government of Madhya Pradesh should be held responsible. The state government and central governments meanwhile hold Union Carbide responsible for paying for a clean-up.

Survivors campaigning for clean water successfully petitioned the Supreme Court of India, which ordered in May 2004 that clean, safe water be piped into the communities. The state government has, until the time of writing (March 2005) ignored this order. A few tankers of water go into the affected areas, but supplies are sporadic. There are things you can do about this. Please see the list below.

Survivors have also filed a Class Action suit against Union Carbide on the issue of contamination and water poisoning in a New York court. The case is currently underway, four attempts by the corporation to have it dismissed have failed. For more information including the latest news on this, please follow links in the left column: Legal issues and cases.

Reports:

• Greenpeace report on continued contamination of drinking water

• Surviving Bhopal, Toxic present, toxic future: A Report on Human and Environmental Chemical Contamination around the Bhopal disaster site by Srishti For the Fact Finding Mission on Bhopal (January 2002)
  (Word version 964kb) (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/documentlibrary/survivingbhopal2002.doc)
  (PDF version 772kb) (http://www.bhopal.net/survivingbhopal.pdf)
  

• Summary of the contamination at the site (written 2001) (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/contamination.html)

[edit] Features

• ICJB video of the 25 November 2002 survivors' attempt to begin a clean-up of the factory, caught police beating up survivors (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/bhopal.mov)

Union Carbide's Secret Papers

• Carbide's seret "poison papers" obtained by court discovery (November 2002) (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/poisonpapers.html)

• Survivors organisations press statement on discovery documents (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/22Novemberpressrelease.html)

• Excerpts from Carbide documents, with photographs and comments (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/excerpts.html)

Clean Up Issues

• People vs Poison (an op-ed on the survivors' 25 November 2002 attempt to begin a clean-up at the factory) (http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/peoplevpoison.html)

[edit] Union Carbide and Dow

Bhopal: Inheriting a Holocaust
reprinted from Corporatewatch.org

In February 2001, Dow Chemical took over Union Carbide of Bhopal notoriety. Dow was warned by survivors of the Bhopal disaster that Union Carbide is a criminal corporation and a fugitive from justice – a proclaimed absconder from criminal proceedings in the Bhopal court where it faces charges of manslaughter.

Carbide had located an inherently hazardous factory in a crowded area in Bhopal despite knowledge that the technology was unproven and the risks were unknown. The decision to go with a substandard technology in India – even while a safer technology was used at its Institute, West Virginia factory – was made, admittedly, on economic grounds and to retain control over Union Carbide India Ltd. While the gas leak of December 3, 1984, killed approximately 8,000 in its immediate aftermath, the long-term effects of the poison gases have taken at least 12,000 more lives till date (2003). At least 150,000 people currently suffer chronic health effects, a third of whom are too ill to work for a living.

In its hurry to escape from India, Union Carbide negotiated a secret deal with the Government of India, mysteriously bringing down the Government’s multibillion dollar demand to a measly $470 million. Most survivors received less than Rs. 25,000 ($500) eight to ten years after the disaster. The oil giant Exxon and the US Government spent more on individual seals and seagulls drenched in the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska than Bhopalis received as compensation for lifelong injury or death. Despite assuring Indian and US courts that it will cooperate with the Indian courts in the legal proceedings against it, Union Carbide Corporation escaped to the United States, after hiving off its share in Union Carbide India, to get back to business-as-usual.

However, its past has continued to haunt it, as new generations of Bhopalis are being born with noticeable health problems including physical, intellectual and reproductive deficits that are suspected (and in some cases, confirmed) to be the hand-me-down effects of the toxic gases. Thousands of tonnes of toxic wastes and obsolete pesticides abandoned by Carbide continue to litter the factory and its surroundings. Poisons leaching from these wastes have contaminated the groundwater supplying 20,000 people living in the vicinity. Studies have found these poisons in the breastmilk of mothers living near the factory.

In what may be its last bid to disappear, Carbide has merged to hide behind the corporate veil created by the Dow-Carbide acquisition. Dow Chemical has refused to address Carbide’s liabilities in Bhopal, although it promptly settled with Carbide’s American victims in the asbestos case less than a year after acquiring Carbide.

[edit] 2004 Hoax

On December 3, 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, a man claiming to be a Dow representative named "Jude Finesterra" was interviewed on the BBC (http://www.bbc.com). He claimed that the company had agreed to clean up the site and compensate those harmed in the incident. video Immediately afterward, Dow's share price fell 4.2% in 23 minutes, for a loss of $2 billion in market value.[2] Dow quickly issued a statement saying that they had no employee by that name —that he was an impostor, not affiliated with Dow, and that his claims were a hoax. BBC broadcast a correction and an apology. The statement was widely carried.

"Jude Finisterra" was actually Andy Bichlbaum, a member of the activist prankster group The Yes Men. In 2002, The Yes Men issued a phony press release explaining why Dow refused to take responsibility for the disaster and started up a website, DowEthics.com (http://www.dowethics.com), designed to look like the Dow website but give what they felt was a more accurate cast on the events. In 2004, a producer for BBC News emailed them through the website requesting an interview, which they gladly obliged. [4]

Taking credit for the prank in an interview on Democracy Now!, Bichlbaum explains how his fake name was derived: "Jude is the patron saint of impossible causes and Finisterra means the end of the Earth". He explained that he settled on this approach (taking responsibility) because it would show people precisely how Dow could help the situation as well as likely garnering major media attention in the US, which had largely ignored the disaster's anniversaries, when Dow attempted to correct the statement. [5]

[edit] Further Reading

• Corpwatch: Bhopal's Legacy
• Corpwatch: Bhopal: Industrial Disaster Victims Still Battle Health Effects 17 Years Later
• Corpwatch: INDIA: Bhopal Disaster and Aftermath Violation of Human Rights
• Corpwatch: Students Nationwide Protest Against Dow Chemical
• Corpwatch: Bhopal Survivors Confront Dow
• Corpwatch: Dynamite in the Center of Town
• India: Holding Corporate Terrorists Accountable
• USA: Judge Tosses Bhopal Lawsuit
• India: After Beatings, Activists Promised Access to Bhopal Site
• Bhopal Survivors Protest Dow's Presence at the World Summit
• Bhopal Activists Declare Victory in US Courts
• Partial Chronology of Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster
• US Congresspersons Ask Dow Chemical to Take Bhopal Disaster Liabilities
• more (http://www.corpwatch.org/search.php?q=bhopal&x=0&y=0)
• Bhopal - The Biggest Crime You Never Heard Of
• Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster, by Javier Moro and Dominique Lapierre, ISBN 0446530883

[edit] War Profiteering

Vietnamese Girl Fleeing in Terror After a Napalm Attack, Nick Ut (Vietnam, 1972.)

Dow has a history of profiting from war. During World War I, Dow manufactured mustard gas and picric acid. For World War II, it supplied magnesium for bombs and chemicals for rubber processing used by the war industry.

The dreaded Napalm that was used by the US military to burn Vietnamese civilians and soldiers alike was a Dow innovation. The jelly-like chemical when sprayed over people would burn them on contact. The Life magazine photograph of a naked child running down a street in Vietnam screaming in agony captures the effects of Napalm. Extolling the virtues of the “back room boys” or the innovators at Dow, a Vietnam veteran is attributed with this perverse but technically illuminating quote about the development of Napalm:

“We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot – if the gooks (Vietnamese) were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene – now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (white phosphorus) so’s to make it burn better. It’ll burn under water now. And just one drop is enough; it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorus poisoning.”

During the reign of the apartheid government in South Africa, Dow supplied it with herbicidal chemicals to render the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe infertile. These actions have cost it a $71 million lawsuit in New York courts by farmers who claim that their lands remain infertile till date. Separately, in October 2003, a New York lawyer filed a case against five companies, including Dow and Union Carbide, accusing them of defrauding South African workers during the Apartheid era.

[edit] Agent Orange

Agent Orange: Vietnam’s Misery

Girl with a birth defect attributed to Agent Orange at Tu Du Obstetric and Gynecological Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.

Dow, along with Monsanto, was one of the principal manufacturers of Agent Orange, a combination herbicide containing 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D that was used during the US military’s chemical warfare in Vietnam. US air force planes bombed jungles and paddy fields with Agent Orange to destroy forest cover and food crops used by the Vietnamese resistance and villagers. Fact aside that the herbicide itself is a poison, Agent Orange also happened to be severely contaminated with dioxins. While a miniscule quantity of dioxin is sufficient to exert serious health effects in generations of humans, the US military is now known to have dumped the equivalent of 600 kilograms of dioxin over Vietnam.

Today, an estimated 500,000 Vietnamese children suffer serious congenital deformities. A 2003 study by Columbia University estimates that “at least 2.1 million but perhaps as many as 4.8 million people would have been present during the spraying.” In 1984, Dow settled for $180 million with 4,000 American veterans exposed to the herbicide during the Vietnam war. The US Government has stonewalled attempts so far by the Vietnamese to seek reparations for America’s Agent Orange legacy.

• Vietnam looks to win Agent Orange law suit: HO CHI MINH CITY, (Reuters) - It is a classroom full of sunlight in Vietnam's southern city formerly known as Saigon, with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck painted on the wall overlooking several computers.

• Agent Orange Victims Sue Monsanto: Tran Anh Kiet's feet, hands and limbs are twisted and deformed. He is 21 years old, but trapped inside a body that appears to belong to a 15 year old with a mental age of around six. He has to be spoon-fed and writhes often in evident frustration. All his attempts at speech are confined to plaintive and pitiful grunts.

• Dow's Nasty Little Secret: A former top official at New Plymouth's lvon Watkins Dow chemical factory has confirmed the worst fears of residents - part of the town may be sitting on a secret toxic waste dump containing the deadly Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange.

[edit] Pesticides, Asbestos & Other Harmful Chemicals

The genesis of Dow dates back to 1890 when Henry Dow set up the Midland Chemical Company at its current location. From the start, Dow’s revenues have been inextricably tied to chlorine chemistry. Chlorine bleach was one of the first products manufactured by the company. As the world’s leading producer of chlorine, PVC and chlorine-based chemicals, Dow, according to some of its shareholders, has the unfortunate claim to fame as “one of the largest manufacturers of dioxin generating products in the world. Dioxins are a group of toxic substances that have been linked with cancer, and damage to the immune, hormone and reproductive systems.”

Many of the products and emissions from industries such as Dow’s just cannot be managed from cradle to grave; chemicals like dioxins, PCBs, and DDT tend to resurrect to haunt future generations. Categorised as Persistent Organic Pollutants or POPs, these chemicals are persistent in the environment and can reappear at harmful doses to humans and other large predators through a process of accumulation and biomagnification in the food chain. POPs and some of their effects can be passed down from mother to child.

[edit] Pesticide

Dow and three other companies continued to produce and export the extremely hazardous pesticide Di Bromo Chloro Propane (DBCP) to developing countries for years after it was banned in the US in 1979. The US ban occurred after DBCP, sold under the name of Nemagon and Fumazone, was linked to human sterility in California.

The companies knew at least since the 1960s that the product caused male sterility in rats, and even speculated that DBCP could be a male contraceptive. However they concealed this information. An internal and confidential report on DBCP from the Dow Chemical Company Biochemical Research Laboratory dated July 23, 1958 reads:

Testicular atrophy may result from prolonged repeated exposure. A tentative hygiene standard of 1 part per million is suggested.

However, Dow did not reduce exposures to the chemical, and neglected to report findings of reduced sperm and atrophied testicles of rabbits and monkeys when they submitted information for registration and labeling. It wasn't until 1977, when 35 of 114 workers at a DBCP production plant in California were found to be sterile, that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (http://www.epa.gov) levied strict regulations of the chemical. One worker in a Dow manufacturing plant said, "After telling me that I shouldn't worry about anything out there because it can't hurt me, now to find out that I'm sterile from it, their answer was, don't worry about that because you can always adopt children".

When DBCP was first marketed in developing countries, it had no labels warning that it was extremely toxic and no instructions on the use of safety equipment. "We sprayed without any protections," says Jose Antonio Rodriguez Pineda, a banana worker who was employed at the San Carlos plantation in El Viejo. "We worked in shorts because it was so muddy, without any protection on our feet or hands." Francisco Gonzales believes he lost his chance to be a father because of the pesticide DBCP. "I can't have children," says Gonzales, who began working in the banana plantations of Chinandega, Nicaragua, in 1975, when he was 20 years old. "It's very painful, you know, each one of us would like to have our own child, a child of our blood. But I was poisoned."

Widespread use of DBCP on banana plantations around the world has caused the permanent sterility of thousands of workers. One study found that approximately 20-25 % of the male working population in banana plantations on Costa Rica's Atlantic coast, where workers had mixed DBCP by hand, were sterilized. DBCP is also believed to cause miscarriages, birth defects, liver damage and cancer when inhaled or absorbed by the skin, and an estimated 22,000 Nicaraguans suffer from Nemagon-caused diseases and disability. This has created a great deal of liability for the companies responsible--primarily Dow, Shell, and Dole. In a 1997 settlement, the four companies that produced the chemical (Dow, Shell, Occidental and Amvac) agreed to pay $41.5 million to 26,000 banana workers in 11 countries.

[edit] Asbestos Legacy

In January 2002, Dow settled a case brought against its subsidiary Union Carbide by workers exposed to asbestos in the workplace. The case was filed before Dow’s acquisition of Carbide. However, as Carbide’s new owner, Dow had to reach a settlement in the case. Additionally, the company has set aside $2.2 billion to address future liabilities. Simultaneously, all companies facing asbestos liabilities and many “big business-friendly” Republican politicians from the US are pushing a bill that would restrict the victims ability to reparations and would bar them from suing companies on product liability laws.11

[edit] VCM Contamination: Louisiana

In 1997, Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals detected the carcinogen vinyl chloride in the groundwater used by an African American community in Myrtle Grove Trailer Park in Plaquemine, Louisiana. The community, however, was not notified until 2001. The trailer park is located close to Dow Chemical’s vinyl chloride monomer factory in Plaquemine. On January 8, 2002, current and former residents of Myrtle Grove filed a suit against Dow alleging that the company knew and covered up information about vinyl chloride contamination in their community. Dow has denied that the VCM in the groundwater is from its factory. Efforts by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to establish the source of the vinyl chloride are reportedly reducing. Meanwhile, residents of the trailer park have been moved out of their homes.

[edit] DBCP and Infertility =

“Dow and three other companies continued to produce the hazardous pesticide Di Bromo Chloro Propane (DBCP) for export to developing countries for years after it was banned in the US in 1979. The US ban occurred after DBCP, one of Pesticide Action Network’s Dirty Dozen pesticides, was linked to human sterility in California.

“The companies knew at least since the 1960s that the product caused male sterility in rats, but concealed this information. They also neglected to report findings of reduced sperm and atrophied testicles of rabbits and monkeys when they submitted information for registration and labeling. When DBCP was first marketed in developing countries, it had no labels warning that it was extremely toxic and no instructions on the use of safety equipment.

Not surprisingly, “Widespread use of DBCP on banana plantations around the world has caused the permanent sterility of thousands of workers. One study found that approximately 20-25 % of the male working population in banana plantations on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast, where workers had mixed DBCP by hand, was sterilised through occupational exposure to DBCP. In a 1997 settlement, the four companies that produce the chemical agreed to pay $45 million to 26,000 banana workers in 11 countries.”10

[edit] Deadly Dursban

Chlorpyrifos is a nerve toxin and suspected endocrine disruptor that has been widely used in US homes and has resulted in 7,000 reported accidents every year. In June 2000, as a result of pressure from environmental and public health organisations, Dow withdrew registration of chlorpyrifos for use in homes and other places where children could be exposed, and severely restricted its use on crops. The company, however, continues to market Dursban in industrialising countries, including India. In 2003, tests conducted by Delhi NGO Centre for Science and Environment for pesticide residues in Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola revealed levels of chlorpyrifos exceeding EU drinking water standards. Dow, however, is not the only supplier of chlorpyrifos in India.

[edit] Human Testing

In 1998, Dow tested Dursban on 60 paid recruits at a lab in Lincoln, Nebraska. Dow also fed Dursban to inmates at Clinton Correctional Institute, New York, in 1972 to assess its effects on humans, a type of study that is now illegal in the United States. In 1995, Dow was fined $732,000 for not sending the EPA reports it had received on 249 Dursban poisoning incidents.12

[edit] Of Silicone and Leaking Breasts

After women started complaining about silicone breast implants leaking their jellylike goo into their bodies and causing a variety of health effects, Dow subsidiary Dow Corning adopted its time-tested spiel that the implants were “100 percent safe.”

In 1997, a New Orleans jury decided that Dow knowingly deceived women with breast implants about the health effects of silicon products. But in 1998, the company Dow Corning and Dow Chemical entered into a settlement for $3.2 billion to cover claims associated with silicon implants among 170,000 women.

[edit] Poisoning its Homegrounds

In 1986, an onsite wastewater facility in Dow’s factory in Midland, Michigan, flooded over. This incident is attributed with the release of dioxin-rich wastewaters into the Tittabawassee River. In 2001, extensive contamination was discovered over a wide area downriver of the Tittabawassee. According to documents from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), soil samples taken in Midland contained dioxins at levels higher than Michigan’s clean-up standard. Some samples exceeded this standard by 80 times.

170 Midland residents have filed a suit seeking reparations from Dow for jeopardising their health and devaluing their property through dioxin contamination. The dioxin swathe extends from the Dow plant to a distance of 36 km. downstream of the River. In November 2001, Dow and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality attempted to work out a “deal” through which the latter would increase the permissible dioxin levels around the Midland plant to ten times the state-wide level to allow Dow’s contamination to fall with legally permissible limits. This attempt was thwarted by local community and environmental activists.

[edit] Additional Reading

• 1/15/05 In Harms Way - Freeport: "James Seidler's family tree is one of the few in this small coastal town with deeper roots than Dow Chemical, a company that has dominated the pancake-flat horizon, and a lot else here, since the 1940s.

• 5/13/04 Barren Justice: "Francisco Gonzáles believes he lost his chance to be a father because of the pesticide DBCP. "I can't have children," says Gonzáles who began working in the banana plantations of Chinandega, Nicaragua, in 1975, when he was 20 years old. "It's very painful, you know, each one of us would like to have our own child, a child of our blood. But I was poisoned."

• 10/25/02 Jury Finds Dow Chemical Responsible in Asbestos Cases: A West Virginia jury found Dow Chemical Co.'s Union Carbide unit responsible for causing asbestos injuries to workers, opening the possibility of millions of dollars in future judgments against the company.

• 8/29/02 Greenpeace Exposes Corporate Criminal Dow Chemical in South Africa: Greenpeace today put the spotlight on one of the world’s most notorious corporate criminals – Dow Chemical – by signposting and fencing off an open discharge pipe for toxic waste at the company’s manufacturing facility in South Africa to serve as a powerful reminder to delegates attending the Johannesburg Earth Summit that “corporate criminals should be punished”.

• 4/22/02 Fabric From Corn-Greenfleece or Greenwash: The dramatic ads feature thought provoking tag lines such as "the seeds of a revolution are sometimes just that," and "unlike every other revolutionary product, this one won't change the world." Blanketing the outdoor equipment trade press over the last several months, the ads hype the biggest environmental breakthrough in fabrics since the creation of fleece from recycled plastic soda bottles.

• 4/3/01 USA: The Dioxin Deception: The causes of cancer are contested. Certainly there is evidence that the disease can be passed down from generation to generation. There is also, of course, proof that smoking can cause lung cancer and a diet high in salt and sugar can cause stomach cancer. But there is no way to predict with certainty who will get cancer or why. And so the wives' tales proliferate: deodorant causes breast cancer; stress causes brain cancer; repression causes colon cancer.

• 1/31/00 USA: Closing the Lid on the Chlorine Industry: The Chlorine Chemistry Council (CCC) has reason to be worried about Joe Thornton's new book. CCC's members -- Dow Chemical, Occidental Petroleum, PPG, Vulcan Chemical, among others -- sell chlorine to a customer base that makes everything from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics to pesticides.

• 5/13/03 An Unreasonable Woman: Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, is a long time environmental justice activist and adversary to corporate polluters like Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. In the early 1980's after witnessing dolphin die-offs, decreased fish catches, and increased health problems in her home-town of Seadrift, Texas, Wilson discovered that she lived in the most polluted county (Calhoun) in the U.S.

[edit] Unethical Business Practice

• US: Dow's Knowledge Factory: "As early as 1918 educational critic Thorstein Veblen grew concerned about corporate influence on college life. In his classic, The Higher Learning in America, Veblen identified college as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output....

• Dow Accused of 'Dead Peasant' Insurance

• Dupont Dow Pleads Guilty: DuPont Dow Elastomers LLC will plead guilty and pay an $84 million criminal fine for fixing the price of synthetic rubber which is used in a variety of products including tires, adhesives, coated fabrics, furniture, and shoes.

• South Africa: Workers Launch $100bn Lawsuit: A $100bn lawsuit seeking compensation for workers employed in South Africa during the apartheid era will be filed in London today against several pension fund managers, international banks, insurers and companies.

• Selling Out Security: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced the appointment of 18 members to the recently established Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) on June 25, five days before their first meeting. Based on the make-up and the secrecy of this council, and the absence of experts who have raised concerns about inadequate homeland security, the council does not currently bring the balance necessary to ensure that security interests prevail over corporate interests.

• NY Sues Dow over Pesticide Advertisting: NEW YORK - New York's state attorney this week said he plans to sue a unit of of Dow Chemical Co. (DOW.N) for allegedly breaching a 1994 agreement against false advertising of a pesticide.

• NY Activist Network Evicted From Internet by Dow, Verio: Bowing to pressure from the Dow Chemical Corporation, the internet company Verio has booted the activist-oriented Thing.net from the Web. Internet service provider Thing.net has been the primary service provider for activist and artist organizations in the New York area for 10 years.

• PPP: Plan Puebla Panama, or Private Plans for Profit?: There is a currently a multi-billion development scheme underway that would turn southern Mexico and all of Central America into a massive free trade zone, competing in the world wide race to the bottom of wages, working conditions, lax environmental regulation and disregard for human rights.

• Farmers Launch Anti-Trust Suit Against Monsanto: Six farmers -- from the U.S. and France -- named as representatives of farmers worldwide, under the aegis of the National Family Farm Coalition, in a suit formulated by Cohen Milstein Hausfeld & Toll on behalf of a consortium of other firms, have launched a major anti-trust, price fixing law suit against the Monsanto Corp. and nine corporate co-conspirators