We regard companies that knowingly introduce toxic substances into the environment as perpetrators of a crime against our children. Here are some of the biggest and most powerful chemical companies whose record of deeds and misdeeds are on the public record.
The U.S. has 82,000 industrial chemicals formulated into 10 million different products.
DuPont has long been one of the largest producers of toxic substances. One of DuPont’s products is Teflon, manufactured in plants in Parkersburg, West Virginia …and contaminating the water supplies in West Virginia and Ohio. In secret tests conducted as long ago as 1984, DuPont found a Teflon-related contaminant in the area’s tap water but the company never told the community, its water utility or state regulators, a violation of federal law. This indestructible chemical, found in the blood of over 95 percent of Americans, causes cancer, birth defects and other serious health problems in animals.
Twenty years later, EPA fined the company $16.5 million for two decades' worth of cover-up (less than half of one percent of DuPont's after-tax annual profits from the Teflon product over that period). For many years, DuPont was a major producer of the tetraethyl lead used in gasoline.