Last night I watched the film "Dark Waters" about one lawyers decades long fight to hold DuPont accountable for the massive contamination of water due to chemicals in "Teflon", which the company had known about, but supressed & ignored.
https://time.com/5737451/dark-waters-true-story-rob-bilott/
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/03/29/attorney-who-sued-dupont-over-tainted-water-takes-his-case-nationwide/7158116001/
I knew nothing about this particular case, but I do remember buying "Teflon" pans when I first got married in 1966. Teflon cookware containing PFOA, which has been shown to come with serious health risks, wasn't banned in the UK until 2005. This chemical was banned globally in 2019. Teflon manufactured after 2005 in the UK does not contain PFOA.
Rob Billott has tried to make DuPont accountable for the harms they knew about for over 20 years. He is an amazingly tenacious man whose whole life was taken over by trying to make a hugely powerful & wealthy multinational company accountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bilott
The thing that gets me is that DuPont is by no means alone in having their own scientific evidence proving the ecological & human harm their products do & ignoring it. The bottom line is always profit & the profits are beyond imagination. So "collateral damage" is accepted. The companies spend huge amounts of money, lobby & obfusticate, denying scientific fact. Exxon Mobil is another prime example. In 1985 the French secret service actually bombed Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand because they were protesting against nuclear testing because of the environmental & human harm it was doing.
The world is finally waking up to the harm that has been done. Multinationals like Coca Cola & Danone are being taken to court because of the massive plastic pollution they have caused. INEOS is being taken to court over new plastics manufacturing projects. Greenpeace publishes a list of the 10 most plastic polluting companies.
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/18876/these-10-companies-are-flooding-the-planet-with-throwaway-plastic/
Multinationals are finally being held responsible & accountable. But it may be too late. People worldwide have microplastics & chemicals in their bodies already. No one knows what the long term impact of that will be. People are suffering from diseases directly caused by pollution. Babies are being born with defects caused by pollution. Eco systems are being destroyed. Species are declining worldwide.
The behaviour of the multinationals is completely unacceptable. Rampant consumerism & massive profits have resulted in a world where hardly a corner is untouched by contamination & pollution. But that isn't the worst part of the story. We are running out of time to reverse this. The damage is huge, some things are already lost & cannot be reversed.
The only real hope is a massive public outcry, huge amounts of money to clean up & develop new technologies to live in a better way in harmony with our environment. That will take enormous political will from every continent.
I don't see much sign of that happening at the moment.
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