Actions against DuPont, Teflon
AlterNet has listed the actions taken against DuPont by the government, environmental groups and private citizens and the chemicals they make including Teflon.They include:
- The 2004 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by Ohio and West Virginia residents living in the vicinity of DuPont's Washington Works plant required the company to spend more than $100 million to ensure that homes in the area are supplied with water uncontaminated with PFOA.
- That settlement also led to initiation of a court-ordered C-8 Health Project, a five-year study correlating PFOA blood-serum levels in more than 60,000 area residents with the incidence of nine types of medical conditions, starting with cancer, heart disease and birth defects.
- A court-appointed Science Panel of three prominent epidemiologists assigned to analyze and interpret the C-8 Health Project data requested permission this fall to study the effects of PFOA on nearly 5,000 Washington Works employees, many of whom have extremely high blood PFOA levels. DuPont is fighting to keep its employees out of the study, claiming that its own surveys of its workers have demonstrated that there are no health risks.
- The EPA sued DuPont in 2004, charging that the company had for years been concealing information on PFOA pollution at Washington Works. A year ago, without admitting any wrongdoing, DuPont agreed to pay $16.5 million in fines and support of research and education -- the largest civil judgment EPA had ever obtained.
- Since 2003, mostly small amounts of PFOA have been detected in groundwater and going into the Cape Fear River near DuPont's Fayetteville Works plant in North Carolina. Then, in 2005, water in a well close to the plant showed an extremely high level of 765 parts per billion (ppb). DuPont began producing a salt of PFOA at Fayetteville in 2002, when 3M, its former supplier, halted manufacture of the chemical at a plant in Minnesota in response to public pressure.
- Last January, a Scientific Advisory Board appointed by the EPA to review the agency's risk assessment of PFOA voted, by a 12-4 majority, to recommend labeling PFOA as "likely to be carcinogenic" in humans, based on animal studies. DuPont disputes the designation, and EPA has not included it in its as-yet unfinished assessment.
- In April, residents of the area around DuPont's Chamber Works plant in Salem Co., New Jersey, filed a lawsuit claiming that the plant had contaminated their water supply with PFCs and that the company had known for years that it was doing so.
- Around the same time, class-action cases against DuPont in 12 states were consolidated as one big case in federal court in Iowa, alleging that the company did not inform consumers that it knew Teflon can emit harmful fumes when overheated.
- In a Nov. 20 consent order, EPA forced DuPont to agree that if the water supply of any household near Washington Works showed a PFOA concentration above 0.5 ppb, the company would pay to provide water treatment or an alternative water supply. The agreement was prompted by findings that people living near the plant had very high blood concentrations of PFOA, 60 times the national average.
- Also in November, a committee of California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment met to consider making PFOA a top-priority chemical for review as a possible carcinogen under state's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. The committee is currently divided on the issue, but if the agency decides to designate PFOA as cancer-causing, any product containing the chemical will have to be so labeled. To have their products carry that stigma in a state the size of California would no doubt mean heavy financial losses to DuPont and other companies.
posted by nattietodd @ 7:20 AM
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