DUPONT SUCKS
| DuPont is a global research and technology-based life sciences, materials and energy company. DuPont serves worldwide
markets including food and nutrition; health care; agriculture; fashion and apparel; home and construction; electronics;
transportation and energy. Unfortunately, the influence of corporate profits outweighs just about any consideration
for the care of our environment. |
DuPont Fined for Teflon Cover-Up
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it will
fine Teflon maker DuPont $16.5 million for two decades' worth
of covering up studies that showed it was polluting drinking
water and newborn babies with an indestructible chemical. It
was EWG's petition that sparked EPA's lawsuit against DuPont.
The fine is the largest administrative fine the EPA has ever
levied under a weak toxic chemical law. However, the $16.5 million
fine is less than half of one percent of DuPont's profits from
Teflon from this time period, and a fraction of the $313 million
the agency could have imposed. Yet another reason to strengthen
our toxic chemical laws, which EWG is launching a campaign to
do. http://www.recipesecrets.net/forums/cooking-tips/13397-dupont-fined-teflon-cover-up.html
I got leukemia when I worked for DuPont.
I wanted no more toxic chemicals in my life. So I retired from
DuPont and moved from Wilmington, DE to Pittsburgh, PA and started
work with Westinghouse. This blog keeps my peeps up to speed on
what happened to me... it's kinda like leukemia took my life,
my old life. This is my new life. I hope it doesn't suck...http://judy--take2.blogspot.com/2007/06/dupont-sucks-sux-and-suxcks.html
Getting Nailed From the January 21-27, 1999 issue of Metro.
Chemical Sister:
Health advocates say that
nail-industry workers like Patty
Moran of Envogue of Los Gatos are still
underprotected and are getting hefty
doses of airborne chemicals in their
lungs and on their skin.
Christopher Gardner
Despite the banning of one
chemical and some increased
education, salon technicians who
sculpt those knockout nails and
acrylic tips say many workers are
still taking a health hit
By Traci Hukill
'SEE THIS?" says Patty Moran, pointing to
the tabletop with her nail file. A fine layer of
white dust--the filings from treated nails--coats
her hands, her client's hands and an area of
about a square foot on the plastic surface.
"I know this thing works because when I
change the filter there's stuff in it," she says as
she peers at a vent register in the specialized
ventilation table. "But I think most of the dust
is in my nose right now."
Moran, 38 and a mother of four, has the sole
nail table in her new workplace, Envogue of
Los Gatos. She only does nails once in a while
now, preferring instead to cut hair. For eight
years during the '80s, though, she made her
living as a manicurist, often working 10-hour
days and six-day weeks. Her specialty was
freehand design work--painting tiny Golden
Gate Bridges and Christmas trees on
sculptured nails.
At the time Moran knew nothing about the
chemicals in the products she was using. She
didn't use a mask, and she worked in a small,
unventilated store with 13 other manicurists
while her manager huffed cigarettes all day.
The smell was overpowering. Moran makes a
face just remembering it.
"I started having trouble breathing," she recalls.
"I got to where I couldn't even smell the
chemicals at all. And I could feel the dust in
my lungs."
Then, in 1989, Moran went to a hair show in
San Jose where someone handed out a booklet
about the hazardous materials in nail products.
"I thought, 'Why didn't anyone tell me this
sooner?' " she says. "And then I decided I
didn't want to work with this stuff anymore. I
didn't want to die young. I got out six months
later."
Even now, after 10 years, Moran is frequently
reminded of how those products affected her
health. "I lost part of my sense of smell," she
says. "When someone says, 'Do you smell
that?' most times I can't smell anything at all."
What Moran didn't know, and what a
substantial number of California's 76,000
manicurists still don't know, is that the
substances they're working with contain
chemicals known to cause eye, skin and lung
irritation, miscarriages and even cancer. The
acetone in nail polish remover can cause
central nervous system depression. The
superglue that binds acrylic nails to the nail bed
contains a substance known to cause asthma.
Nail hardeners use formaldehyde, a
carcinogen. Nail polish contains toluene, a
neurotoxicant that can harm fetuses. The list
goes on.
CRITICS DISAGREE over the severity of the
problem. At one extreme is Nhu-Ha Le, an
environmental engineer who worked for
DuPont and Monsanto for 16 years. She got
worried about nail products when her sister
became a manicurist several years ago. Le
conducted an informal survey of several
hundred manicurists in Delaware and found
that within seven years most of them had
suffered from respiratory tract infections. Plus,
she found, "Every nail technician feels
exhausted at the end of a day because they're
exposed to long hours of vapors. They have
mood swings."
In contrast, Doug Schoon, research director
for Southern California-based Creative Nail
Design and a member of the Safety and
Standards Committee of the Nail
Manufacturers Council, says the whole subject
is a tempest in a teapot. "I think the level of
concern really needs to be understood," he
says. "There's really very little health risk in
using these things. About the worst thing that
can happen is someone becomes allergic, and
again that's from repeated, prolonged exposure
to the skin."
At the center of a debate over the health risks
of nail products are the methacrylates, a family
of chemicals used in making resins. A material
called methyl methacrylate, used to make
temporary crowns in dentistry, was also used
for artificial nails until 1979, when the FDA
banned it as "poisonous and deleterious." Now
confined to the black market, MMA still
occasionally finds its way into salons because it
is cheap, and there are rumors of salon owners
who put MMA-based materials in legitimate
containers. One nail product manufacturer has
even created a test kit to determine the
presence of MMA in a given product.
With its nefarious first cousin off the scene, a
related product called ethyl methacrylate, or
EMA, has stepped up as the bonding agent of
choice in legitimate nail salons. EMA is the
primary reason for the powerful chemical smell
in salons. When manicurists apply acrylic nails,
they make a strong, fast-drying resin by
dipping a brush in a fixative powder and then
in a liquid containing EMA, then quickly
brushing the mixture on the nail. The result is
an extremely hard bond that has been criticized
for being too adhesive. Some women have
actually had their nails ripped off the nail bed
because the glue is so much stronger than the
nail, and when the hand is jammed or
knocked, the nail gives way before the glue
does.
Though it's generally agreed that EMA isn't as
harmful as MMA, the former still garners its
share of criticism. Says Le, "The natural dust
of nail filing you can inhale and exhale back
out. But when you treat nails with EMA and
file them, it makes dust you can't breathe out.
It stays in your lungs."
Laura Stock of UC-Berkeley's Labor
Occupational Health Program points out that
just because a product has not been banned by
the FDA doesn't mean it's not bad for you.
"The process of getting something banned is so
long and arduous that you can't assume that
anything that isn't banned is safe," she says.
One of the problems with EMA is that
scientists have not yet agreed on how much of
it humans can tolerate. Studies have shown
that a typical nail salon has 30 to 40 parts per
million of EMA in the air. Le says one part per
million is too much. Doug Schoon says the
limit is more like 200 parts per million. The
National Institutes of Health are considering
funding an investigation into the matter to
settle it once and for all.
Not surprisingly, industry associations tend to
downplay the danger of chemicals in nail
products. Says Vi Nelson, spokeswoman for
the American Beauty Association, "[The
manicurists] have all been trained. And if there
is any product that requires special caution, the
manufacturer would indicate that on the label
or in the instructions."
For his part, industry chemist Schoon blames
any skin irritation development on the
practitioners themselves. "If after years people
develop reactions," he says, "well, that's
because they're sloppy. I've seen people
wiping brushes off with their fingers." He also
points out that though some nail technicians
develop asthma, "People who aren't nail
technicians get asthma, too."
Unlike construction sites and manufacturing
plants, nail salons aren't considered
high-hazard work sites. CalOSHA inspectors
visit nail salons when there are employee
complaints, but they don't make regular
appearances as they do with some other
industries. And when they do visit, they aren't
looking for masks or ventilation hoods because
those things are not currently required by law.
What is required is a general standard of air
cleanliness that applies to banks and shoe
stores as well as nail salons. To determine that,
inspectors have to test the air quality. And then
they have to make a judgment call about
chemicals with no legally identified permissible
exposure limit, which is still the case with most
products in nail salons.
IN NOVEMBER the Toxic Avengers Theater,
a project of the nonprofit Santa Clara Center
for Occupational Safety and Health, presented
a series of radio programs aired in Vietnamese.
One episode, "The Story of the Manicurist,"
features an older nail technician suffering from
health problems she blames on nail products.
Ill and regretful, she cautions her younger
colleagues to protect themselves as she did not.
Toxic Avengers Theater exists to serve
immigrant unorganized workers in low-wage
chemical-intensive jobs--in other words, a
group of people with little power working in
high-risk jobs.
Many of the nail industry's newest arrivals are
Southeast Asian. The state Department of
Consumer Affairs now administers manicure
and cosmetology certification tests in English,
Spanish, Vietnamese and Japanese. One
reason for the high rate of Asian women in the
business is the relatively high return on low
investment. In California, home to almost a
third of the nation's licensed manicurists, a
manicurist curriculum is 400 hours long, or
about 10 weeks. As soon as that's complete, a
worker, no matter how recently arrived in the
United States, can be well on her way to
earning a respectable income--a recent
industrywide survey published in Nails
magazine listed manicurists' average income as
$482 a week.
Generally speaking, workers appear to be on
their own, at least in the South Bay. The union
that represents barbers and cosmetologists--the
United Food and Commercial
Workers--represents only a couple of hundred
practitioners in the area, and most of those are
barbers. The California Cosmetologists
Association, which represents about 2,000
manicurists, hairdressers, barbers and
estheticians statewide, doesn't track its
members' health complaints.
Slowly the industry has made strides toward
educating its workers. In 1994 the state
cosmetology board, working with the Labor
Occupational Health Program at UC-Berkeley,
created a 15-hour course as a mandatory part
of certification in California. That's good news
for recent beauty school graduates, but many
women who were certified before that aren't
aware of the dangers posed to their health by
the nail polish, glue, liquid monomers and
polish remover they work with each day. And
it's hard to believe that working manicurists
who don't speak enough English to understand
the question "Do you worry about the
chemicals you work with?" could have
understood and retained two days' worth of
detailed information about chemical hazards.
Many women, if they do experience health
problems, don't make the connection to their
workplace. Says Amanda Hawes, an
occupational health attorney who specializes in
hazardous substance cases, "What happens a
lot is people will go to the doctor because
they're not feeling good, and the doctor will
ask them, 'Do you work with chemicals?' and
they'll say, 'No.' They don't think of the things
they work with every day as toxic chemicals."
Will Forest, a toxicologist with the occupational
health branch of the state health department,
says a "substantial number" of calls fielded by
his office come from manicurists concerned
about the levels of toxicity in nail products. He
cautions, though, against confusing smell with
toxicity. "People have the mistaken notion that
the smell indicates the amount of hazard," he
says. "But really it varies place to place." He
recommends masks for the dust and a good
ventilation system to deal with the vapors.
Certainly workers are more aware than they
used to be. Many women use masks when
working, which helps to filter EMA dust. Le
says that's insufficient, that the microns from
nail dust are small enough to pass through the
masks. And they certainly don't help with
vapors.
No, the entrepreneurial Le has a better
idea--the NailVent2000, a contraption of her
design that looks like an aquarium with glove
holes on the manicurist's side and hand holes
for the client. It's in effect a miniature
see-through quarantine room. It sucks the
fumes and dust right into an attached filter so
the vapors need never pass through the
worker's and client's breathing zones.
Unfortunately, many technicians won't be able
to afford Le's $1,200 system. And it will likely
be a long time before nail product companies
feel sufficient heat from the loosely organized
manicurists to put time and money into
researching nontoxic alternatives to profitable
products. Meanwhile, good ventilation and
masks are a nail technician's best friends.
Le, who has already marketed the system on
the East Coast with fair success, plans on
peddling her pet product in California next
month. Although it's expensive, she insists it's
worth it. "It's cheaper than a coffin," she quips
slyly.
For questions about chemicals involved in nail products,
call the occupational health branch of the state health
department at 510/622-4300.
Chemical Giant Dupont Faces CoverUp
Charges
DuPont Faces Costly Jury Trial Over Evidence Growers press
RICO claims against chemical giant
By Mary Hladky Florida Daily
Business Reviews Tuesday, December 29, 1998
Ten growers have been given court approval to press racketeering charges against
chemical giant DuPont for allegedly withholding, covering up or
destroying evidence that its fungicide Benlate ruined crops.
While numerous suits filed nationwide in the past two years
allege that DuPont engaged in racketeering, Miami-Dade Judge Amy
Steele Donner apparently is the first to rule that the issue can
be decided by a jury.
The importance of the two Dec. 15 decisions,
which deny DuPont's request to dismiss the case, goes
beyond forcing a large corporation to defend itself against
allegations of criminal activity, including fraud, perjury, and
witness and evidence tampering. A pattern of such activity would
violate the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations (RICO) Act. Under the state's civil racketeering
law, if growers prevail at trial they will be able to obtain
triple whatever monetary damages a jury awards.
Miami lawyer Harley Tropin, who represents the 10 growers in Florida and Costa
Rica, has not set a dollar amount he is seeking, but said it will
be in the tens of millions. "DuPont has filed motions to dismiss
the case on every conceivable grounds," Tropin said. "We are
delighted Judge Donner has sifted through all that and found that
DuPont has to defend its conduct before a jury." Tropin and his
legal team, which includes Janet Humphreys and Adam Moskowitz of
Kozyak, Tropin & Throckmorton, as well as Marc Cooper of Cooper &
Wolfe, will ask Donner to set a trial date at a Jan. 15 hearing.
He expects the trial to begin this summer. Lance Harke, who
represents DuPont along with his partner Alice Hector, said they
plan to ask Donner to reconsider. "These suits were brought more
than five years after the statute of limitations period," Harke
said. Harke also said that Donner's rulings don't necessarily
clear the way for trial. He and Hector have motions pending and
others they plan to file that could derail a trial, if Donner
rules in their favor. Many of the growers' claims, Harke said,
are based on the way DuPont defended itself at various trials
across the country. That is improper, he said, because how
lawyers defend a client is protected and cannot form the basis of
a suit.
The racketeering suit against DuPont, which also alleges
negligence, fraud and breach of warranty, is a civil action.
While the criminal racketeering law is better known, similar
evidence is presented in civil and criminal cases. The difference
is the standard of proof; in a civil case a plaintiff need only
convince jurors with a preponderance of the evidence, rather than
the more stringent criminal law standard of guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt.
Donner ruled on Oct. 28 that DuPont must turn
over to the growers' attorneys thousands of pages of internal
documents that the company unsuccessfully argued were
confidential and protected by attorney-client privilege. Those
documents, which are expected to bolster growers' contentions
that DuPont knew it had a defective product but withheld that
information, are to be turned over to Tropin in mid-January, and
will be part of the evidence presented at the racketeering trial.
DuPont has paid out an estimated $1 billion on some 1,400 claims
since 1990 that the fungicide Benlate 50 DF destroyed crops. Most
of the suits had been settled or concluded by trial until growers
began returning to court two years ago, asserting that they were
entitled to more money because they learned only after their
cases concluded that DuPont had committed far more extensive
wrongdoing by withholding or destroying evidence.
Although DuPont recalled Benlate in 1991, the company has consistently
argued its product was not defective and did not cause crop
losses. Company spokesman Mike Ricciuto was not available Monday
for comment on Donner's rulings. The setbacks for DuPont come on
the heels of a recent legal victory. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals this month dismissed claims that DuPont defrauded
growers into settling earlier lawsuits for less than they
deserved.
The appeals court concluded that the growers, as
mandated by federal rules of civil procedure, did not return
settlement proceeds before suing anew. Another problem for
growers was that they had signed agreements releasing DuPont and
its attorneys from "any and all liability" as part of their
settlements.
A similar case is pending before the 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals. The 11th Circuit decision does not affect the
Miami state court cases, Tropin said, because his grower clients
are first-time litigants who have never settled. The behavior of
DuPont and its lawyers has resulted in sanctions by three judges,
including Donner. In 1996, Donner signed a strongly worded order
in which she concluded that DuPont had acted in bad faith, abused
the judicial process and destroyed evidence. DuPont's conduct,
she wrote, was so egregious that she had no choice but to strike
its pleadings. That meant DuPont was liable for damages. When the
cases before Donner settled days later, she vacated her order.
The 11th Circuit threw out a $115 million discovery abuse
sanction against DuPont in 1996 for procedural reasons, but
suggested a federal prosecutor should investigate. Accordingly, a
Macon, Ga., federal judge in November ordered a criminal
investigation of DuPont for possible obstruction of justice. The
Supreme Court of Hawaii recently upheld a finding that Benlate
was defective, as well as a $1.5 million sanction against DuPont
for withholding test data.
http://womnhlth.home.mindspring.com/
DUPONT, TERRA RESOLVE DIFFERENCES OVER BENLATE
The DuPont chemical company has reached an agreement with the
retailer Terra over responsibility for Benlate DF claims. Under the
settlement, Terra's two lawsuits against Benlate, pending in an Iowa
court, and DuPont's lawsuit against Terra, pending in a Delaware
court, will be dropped. DuPont has agreed to resume all
responsibility for claims against its Benlate product. In exchange,
Terra has agreed to continue selling DuPont products. "Terra is
looking forward to building a stronger business relationship with
DuPont and is happy, once again, to be able to offer Terra's customers
a full range of DuPont products." Several cases are currently pending
against DuPont by growers of specialty crops who claim the product
damaged their crops. The company has already paid out millions of
dollars in claims.
Source: "DuPont and Terra Put Benlate Differences Behind Them," AG
RETAILER, January 1994.