A non-sticky situation

The Toronto Star for August 9 reports that for over twenty years, the DuPont corporation has had environmental and health concerns about a chemical used in making teflon. And for over twenty years, DuPont has hidden that information from the Environmental Protection Agency in a vast illegal coverup to allow it to continue raking in the $100 million in profits teflon generates every year.

Now, as a result of a complaint filed by the EPA last week, DuPont faces the possibility of a fine that could reach to $300 million.

Teflon constituents have found their way into rivers, soil, wild animals and humans, according to company, government environmental officials and others. Evidence suggests that some of the materials, known to cause cancer and other problems in animals, may be making people sick. ...

The [EPA] is also investigating whether the suspect chemical, a detergent-like substance called perfluorooctanoic acid, is harmful to human health, and how it has become so pervasive in the environment.

The chemical — which is more commonly known as PFOA or C-8, for the number of carbon atoms in its molecular structure — has turned up in the blood of more than 90 per cent of Americans, according to samples taken from blood banks by the 3M Co. beginning in the mid-1990s.

Note that the issue of whether PFOA is harmful to health is separate from the issue of concealment. The evidence is that DuPont believes the chemical is potentially harmful and in fact knew it to be in the public drinking water around its Parkersburg, WV, plant (where teflon is made) at levels higher than it considered safe. None of this, it seems, was reported to the EPA, which is a violation of federal law. Even if by some remote chance PFOA proved to be innocuous, it would not absolve DuPont of its obligations to have reported its findings of possible harmful effects. Even so,

[s]ome people who live in or near Parkersburg in West Virginia, where DuPont has manufactured Teflon for 50 years, are not waiting for more studies. Thousands of them have joined in a class-action suit filed in the state's Wood County Circuit Court against the chemical maker, which they charge knowingly contaminated the air, land and water around the plant for decades without informing the community. ... The trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Among the documents pried loose by the suit are

several DuPont memorandums from 2000 in which John Bowman, a company lawyer, warned two of his superiors — Thomas Sager, a vice-president and assistant general counsel, and Martha Rees, an associate general counsel — that the company would "spend millions to defend these lawsuits and have the additional threat of punitive damages hanging over our head." ...

"Our story is not a good one," he wrote in one memo. "We continue to increase our emissions into the river despite internal commitments to reduce or eliminate the release of this chemical into the community and environment because of our concern about the biopersistence of this chemical."

Despite that, I have little hope that DuPont will be held in any significant way responsible for a 20-year history of maintaining profits at the expense of others' health. If history is any guide, the EPA will eventually accept a consent decree with a symbolic fine of an amount that DuPont can laugh off - and the poisoned people around its plants will get a hefty jury judgment (prompting pseudo-shocked outcries among the wingnuts about the need for "tort reform") before an appeals court rules that the jury award was "unreasonable" and cuts it to a small fraction of the original amount. DuPont will then launch a PR campaign declaring itself "totally vindicated" and proceed on its merry corporate way while the pundits huff and puff about "frivolous lawsuits" and "junk science" - and others are left to pick up DuPont's mess and suffer the consequences of its profit-driven environmental indifference.