Chemicals & Manufacturing

Greenpeace has warned of "surprisingly high" levels of arsenic and mercury in the red sludge that burst out of a metals plant reservoir in Hungary, killing six people and devastating the surrounding area. Read More

If you ever buy an item of clothing from Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, you can be sure it will not contain any cotton from Uzbekistan. The company decided to boycott Uzbek cotton in 2006, following reports of forced and state-sanctioned child labour. That was the easy part. Eliminating the unwanted material from Tesco's supply chain and proving that it was no longer used would take until the end of 2007. Read More

Asbestos, a known carcinogen, causes 100,000 occupational deaths per year. Although banned in much of the world, asbestos is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia's development boom, and its export remains both legal and profitable -- to the health detriment of the region. Read More

Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. Most of these come from China. "In many places, the mining is abused," said Wang Caifeng, the top rare-earths industry regulator at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China. Read More

Patrick Daniel, the CEO of Enbridge Inc, is bullish about the future of unconventional oil from Canada's massive tar sand deposits. His company not only operates North America's longest crude oil and liquid pipelines, but transports 12 percent of the oil that the U.S. imports daily. Canada's bitumen, or dirty crude, lies under a forest area the size of England and is arguably the world's last remaining giant oil field. Read More

For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they've come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation's two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents. Now Monsanto -- like IBM and Google -- has drawn scrutiny from U.S. antitrust investigators. Read More

CrocTail is an extension of the Crocodyl.org Wiki web site project, an online compendium profiling the accountability and transparency track records of multinational corporations. Developed with support from the Sunlight Foundation, CrocTail users can search the entire subsidiaries database. In this new version, users can click on different years and see how subsidiary relationships for a company have changed over time. Read More

Violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found. Polluters include small companies, like gas stations, dry cleaners, and shopping malls. They also include large operations, like chemical factories, power plants, sewage treatment centers and one of the biggest zinc smelters, the Horsehead Corporation of Pennsylvania. Read More

In a combative and sometimes colorful annual meeting, Chevron's CEO and chairman exchanged barbs with activists over pollution in the Amazon rain forest and the company's human rights record. The nation's second-largest oil company is awaiting a verdict from a judge in Ecuador that could come with a $27 billion price tag. Read More

Chevron's 2008 annual report is a glossy celebration of the company's most profitable year in its history. What Chevron's annual report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns, or the global movement gaining voice and strength against the company's abuses. This jointly-produced report documents negative impacts of Chevron's operations around the globe, in stark contrast to the message sent by the company's ubiquitous "Human Energy" advertising campaign. Read More