CORPORATE PROFILE DOW: THE
MENACE FROM MIDLAND
By Ross Brockley Ross Brockley is a freelance writer living in West
Virginia. In 1985, after leaving his position as president of Dow's operations
in Europe to become Dow Chemical's chief executive officer, Frank Popoff
said he felt "The world coming together into a one world industry in chemistry."
Not everyone shares Popoff's views on industrial chemicals. Popoff, who
takes home just under a million a year from Dow, sees the world coming
together in chemistry. But Tom Adams, who lives in Franken, Michigan, sees
the same world falling apart as a result of chemistry. Franken is not far
away from Midland, Michigan, the world headquarters of Dow. Adams is a
member of a grassroots organization called STORM (Stop Trashing Our Resources
in Michigan) Action which, in response to the company's plan to burn Agent
Orange waste at a new toxics incinerator in Midland, is resuming the "Dow
shall not kill" campaign that was staged in the 1960s. In addition to calling
for Dow to close the incinerator, STORM Action intends to press the company
to eliminate chlorine use in its manufacturing and to institute a number
of other broad changes in company policy. 100 years of Dow Henry Dow came
to Midland in 1890 to begin extracting bromine from one of the hundreds
of brine wells under the town. Dow's experiments soon produced chlorine,
sodium, magnesium and calcium, and he formed the Midland Chemical Company.
Chlorine bleach was the companies' first product. In 1897, Dow renamed
the company after himself, and it soon became one of the leaders in the
reinvention of the world by organic chemists. U.S. chemical manufacturers
were given a boost in World War I as the country cut ties with the world-leading
German chemical producers, which held virtual monopolies on many compounds.
Dow produced picric acid and mustard gas for the war effort. In World War
II, Dow made magnesium for bombs, as well as styrene and butadiene used
in the production of synthesized rubber. Dow's magnesium plant on the Texas
Gulf was the first of the numerous petrochemical complexes that operate
there today. Dow's research for World War II led to the development of
many new plastics, including Saran wrap and styrofoam. With the introduction
of these consumer products in the 1950s, Dow's sales quadrupled. Using
oil as a feedstock, the newly formed petrochemical industry boomed. It
would go on to redesign the U.S. economy and culture and agriculture. Today,
Dow manufactures over 2,000 products, chiefly chemicals and synthetic plastics.
Historically, Dow has principally sold commodities, like styrofoam, in
bulk to other industries. Bulk sales have fallen 20 percent, however, as
Dow has diversified, expanding its consumer products and moving into pharmaceuticals,
building materials and, most recently, energy. Dow, the second largest
U.S. chemical corporation behind DuPont and sixth in the world, operates
181 plants in 32 countries and employs 62,000 people worldwide. Dow's sales
were $19.8 billion in 1990, with over half of its sales outside the United
States. Pollutants and politics at Dow As the century comes to a close,
the petrochemical industry is facing mounting criticism from environmentalists.
Some, such as Barry Commoner, founder of the Center for the Biology of
Natural Systems at Queen's College of the City University of New York,
say that mild reform is not enough and that the industry must be shut down
altogether. For Dow and other chemical producers, this poses not a moral
or technological dilemma, but a political one. It is not a new problem
for Dow. Dow Chemical became a household name and experienced its first
public relations problems in the 1960s as a result of its production of
Agent Orange. The major supplier of the Agent Orange defoliant used by
the U.S. Army in Vietnam with devastating consequences, the company was
the subject of numerous protests, including the "Dow shall not kill" campaign.
At the company's annual shareholders' meeting in 1970, the year of the
first Earth Day, then-company chair Herbert Henry Doan addressed public
concern by breaking with the company's past tradition of strongly opposing
all regulation and touted government intervention as important to the industry.
The second time the company dedicated its end-of-the-year summary to environmental
concerns was in 1990, just prior to the 20-year anniversary of Earth Day.
There is a photo of a marsh and geese on the cover of the 1989 annual report
along with text reading, "One issue, more than any other, will affect Dow's
prospects--in the '9Os and beyond. That issue is the environment." Dow's
current "environmentalism"--Popoff says he is one of the company's 62,000
environmentalists--comes not only in the context of surging public concern
about the environment, but in response to a severe image problem Dow experienced
in the early 1980s. Dow had renewed its militantly anti-regulatory posture,
was receiving attention for polluting the air, land and water around Midland
and was arguing aggressively that dioxin is not harmful to humans (a position
it still maintains). A 1983 Washington Post article on the company's record
contained the headline: "Dow Comes Under Attack for its Pollutants and
Its Politics." The Post reported that Dow had just hired Hill and Knowlton,
the public relations firm, to remake its image. Now, the company touts
its awards, such as the World Environment Center's 1989 Gold Medal for
International Corporate Achievement, awarded for Dow's five-year, $860
million investment in "environmental health and safety" initiatives such
as its Waste Reduction Always Pays (WRAP) program. The company also plays
up its "CONSERVATION 2000: A Dow Commitment to Protect the Environment"
initiative, featuring a four-year "Partnership for Wetlands Conservation"
with the environmental organizations Ducks Unlimited, the Nature Conservancy
and the National Fish and Wildlife Federation. Dow plans to donate $3 million
to the wetlands protection effort. In 1990, Dow founded a new branch of
its research and development department, called "Research for the Environment,"
to develop more "environmentally friendly" products. Much of the research
is being conducted through joint ventures or subsidiaries. Poisonous pesticides
Despite the company's high-profile public relations campaign and its substantial
investment in research, Dow remains a major source of pollution. Though
the company emphasizes that it is only a minor contributor to many toxic
dump sites, as of January 1990 it was the eighth most often named Superfund
polluter, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designating it
as a potentially responsible party at 24 Superfund sites. Perhaps more
significantly, the company produces a wide array of hazardous products
which poison the environment through everyday use. For example, according
to the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides (NCAMP), Dow's
pesticide Dursban--which became a very popular termite exterminant when
the EPA banned Chlordane--is creating health problems, ranging from headaches
and nausea to behavioral problems in children, throughout the United States.
Susan Cooper of NCAMP says that at least one out of every two telephone
calls that her office receives concerns Dursban. The company's products,
including those not permitted to be sold in the United States, take their
greatest toll in the Third World. The San Francisco-based Pesticide Action
Network (PAN) reports that Dow produced or distributed three pesticides
included on PAN's "Dirty Dozen" list until the late 1980s: EDB, pentachlorophenol
and DBCP. DBCP and EDB are both carcinogens and penta damages the liver,
kidney and central nervous systems. The effects of DBCP have been widely
publicized due to an innovative law suit filed against Dow and Shell Oil
[see "The South's Day in Court," Multinational Monitor, July/August 1990].
The EPA ordered a phaseout of DBCP on food and later banned all pesticides
containing the substance. The action came after DBCP contaminated groundwater
in an area of thousands of square miles in the central valley in California
and made agricultural workers who were exposed to it sterile. Aware of
the pesticide's devastating effects, Dow sold much of its stockpile of
DBCP to the Dole Corporation, which used it on banana plantations in Costa
Rica. Farmworkers there applied DBCP until they began experiencing numerous
health problems, including infertility; their experience led the Costa
Rican government to ban the pesticide in 1979. In 1990, the affected Costa
Rican workers and their attorneys succeeded in persuading the Texas Supreme
Court to allow their case to be heard in Texas. The case is the first in
the United States to be brought against a U.S. corporation for crimes committed
in another country against foreigners. One thousand workers are now seeking
to recover damages from Dow and Shell, another producer of the pesticide.
Dow's joint venture with Eli Lilly, DowElanco, exports two pesticides from
the United States which are not registered with the EPA. The EPA has refused
DowElanco's registration application for haloxyfop, an herbicide marketed
under the names "Gallant" and "Verdict," and has classified it as a "probable
human carcinogen." According to a July 1990 Greenpeace report, "Never-Registered
Pesticides," haloxyfop is used in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe.
The EPA has refused to set a permissible amount of residue (known as food
residue tolerances) for both haloxyfop and nuarimol, a DowElanco product
sold under the trade names "Gauntlet" and "Tridal." The EPA refused to
permit any nuarimol residues on food because it creates cancer and birth
defects in laboratory animals. Nevertheless, Greenpeace reports that nuarimol
is used in Africa, Colombia and Honduras and Europe. Though the EPA technically
bans haloxyfop or nuarimol residues on food sold in the United States,
they are likely to appear anyway, since "food is rarely tested for residues
at the border," according to the Greenpeace report. Greenwashing Even a
number of the company's so-called environmental initiatives and allegedly
environmental friendly policies threaten the environment, often by diverting
attention from alternatives or the need to develop alternatives to existing
hazardous products. Dow is a member, for example, of the "Alliance for
Responsible CFC Policy," a business group which, according to its policy
statement, works "to ensure that the establishment of reasonable government
policies regarding the further regulation of CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons]
and protection of the stratospheric ozone layer be pursued on an international
basis and be based on sound scientific facts." Dow does not produce CFCs,
but it uses them in its production of styrofoam. Having refused to acknowledge
that CFCs destroy the ozone layer until 1988, the Alliance and Dow are
now delaying the phase-out of CFCs and promoting the use of HCFCs. HCFCs--which
were known as a type of CFC until 1988, when the industry renamed them
in order to make them environmentally palatable--deplete up to 95 percent
less ozone than CFCs, but they still contribute to ozone destruction. Environmentalists
argue that it is critical to immediately stop producing ozone-destroying
chemicals because CFCs continue to deplete ozone for such a long period
of time. "Even if all CFC production had stopped in 1990, stratospheric
ozone depletion would increase until at least 2010," reports Patrick McCully
in the May/June 1991 Ecologut. Any additional depletion will increase the
incidence of diseases associated with increased exposure to ultraviolet
light due to ozone depletion, including skin cancer and blindness due to
cataracts. Dow is also a vocal and prominent advocate of plastics recycling.
Along with seven other plastics manufacturers, Dow formed the National
Polystyrene Recycling Company, with a goal of recycling 25 percent of the
polystyrene used for food service and packaging applications in the United
States. It has entered into an arrangement with the U.S. Department of
the Interior to promote recycling in U.S. national parks. The program's
focus is on recycling plastics. In announcing it, Popoff said, "It is time
to recognize these materials not as waste but as renewable resources. Plastics
are renewable resources, the same as glass, aluminum and paper." Dow hopes
to have recycled plastics returned as picnic tables, park benches and other
products. The problem with plastics recycling, however, is that it is not
really recycling. As Commoner explains, the "system is not closed." Plastics
can only be recycled into lower grade plastics. Used styrofoam cups, for
example, might be used to make a picnic table, but they cannot be recycled
as styrofoam. New styrofoam will have to be manufactured to create new
cups. Essentially all recycling plastics does, Commoner says, is create
one more market for the industry. In the energy field, where Dow is venturing
with its subsidiary Destec, the story is similar. Dow and Destec are currently
developing alternative fuels, chiefly what they call a "clean coal technology,"
syngas. Syngas is produced by burning hydrocarbons off of low-grade coal
and removing the sulfur. Huge stockpiles of low-grade coal exist in U.S.
reserves, so this energy source is plentiful, but gasified coal has its
critics. Dr. Jim Mackenzie of the World Resources Institute, a Washington,
D.C.-based environmental think tank, believes that developing "clean coal
technology" today is too little, too late. "It's trying to put the finishing
touches on an industry that should be phased out. We've got to reduce carbon
emissions by 50 to 80 percent if we want to prevent catastrophic effects
of global warming." Coal burning emits more carbon than any other major
source of fuel, and Dow's technology does not reduce carbon emissions.
Downscaling the petrochemical industry While Dow appears to have made some
genuine progress in waste and pollution emissions reduction, the fact that
many of its so- called solutions in fact perpetuate the problems they are
supposed to address helps reveal the intractability of the problems caused
by the petrochemical industry itself. No matter how environmentally-friendly
Dow claims to be, it is unlikely that company executives will ever acknowledge
that the industry is an environmental hazard and that the use of chemicals
and plastics must be drastically reduced if the planet is to remain habitable
for humans. Of course, a company such as Dow will not welcome proposals
to terminate certain lines of its industry. When asked to comment on the
assertion that the environment would best be helped by reducing or eliminating
pesticides in agriculture and replacing them with sustainable methods like
integrated pest management, crop rotation and natural predators, a company
spokesperson said, "Obviously we would disagree with that." Historically,
Dow has also disagreed with a number of other important health and environmental
claims. It denied that Agent Orange seriously injured thousands of U.S.
soldiers in Vietnam (the Vietnamese have never been able to use U.S. courts
to demand that Dow, other Agent Orange manufacturers and the U.S. government
compensate them for the far more serious effect Agent Orange had on their
health and safety), for example, and that dioxin threatens human life.
That Dow opposes proposals to massively downscale worldwide dependence
on petrochemicals is no surprise--but that is no reason not to do it.