Chemicals & Manufacturing

In August 2020, a huge explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon, killed 218 people. The cause was determined to be a fire that ignited a cargo of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that had brought to the port on the MV Rhosus, a ship registered to Savaro Ltd., a UK company. Victims’ families sued Savoro in UK courts – and in February the High Court of Justice in London ruled that Savoro needs to compensate the affected families. Read More

Traditional Māori owners are fighting to force Norske Skog to clean up the toxic mess left behind by the six decade old Tasman paper and pulp mill on the Rotorua lake on the North Island of New Zealand that closed for good in 2021. Read More

Workers at construction materials company Saint Gobain’s factory in Cuaulta, Morelos, Mexico, defeated company-backed union Confederation of Workers & Peasants (CTC) to set up a new union named the Independent Union of Free and Democratic Workers of Saint-Gobain. The victory over CTC was a result of major labor law reforms enacted in 2019. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the steel giant, has promised to invest $1 billion to upgrade its mining and metallurgical complex in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, where dozens of workers have died in industrial accidents in recent years and the pollution is so bad that winter snow sometimes turns black. Read More

Formosa Plastics, based in Taiwan, has proposed to build one of the world’s biggest plastics factory - a massive new $9.4 billion complex in St. James, Louisiana. The plans for the plant are projected to double air pollution in an area with some of the worst air quality in the U.S. Read More

Wearing white overalls stained with blood-red paint, members of Extinction Rebellion protested at Monsanto’s headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in mid-May. Read More

Lawyers for a group of some 1,200 Nicaraguan banana plantation workers appeared before the Paris Trial Court in an effort to force Dow Chemical, Occidental Chemical and Shell Oil to pay $1 billion in compensation for health problems caused by Nemagon, a pesticide sold by the three companies. Read More

Stanka Becheva, a food and agriculture campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, speaks by video with Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch about the Meat Atlas 2021, a report that documents the methods and impacts of the meat industry, naming and shaming the small handful of companies that control it. Read More

CorpWatch executive director Pratap Chatterjee interviews Anna Feigenbaum, associate professor in Digital media & communication at Bournemouth University in the Southwest of England, on the role of private sector companies that manufacture riot control weaponry, used against protestors around the world. Read More

Over 100 consumer groups are calling on the U.S. Congress to ignore demands from business lobby groups - like the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - to enact laws guaranteeing corporations blanket immunity from coronavirus pandemic lawsuits. Proposals for such a law have been making the rounds for over a month. Read More