Cancer Alley: Formosa profile

Image

Formosa Plastics Corporation was founded in 1954 in Taiwan. It manufactures plastics, and is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The company first attracted global attention when it was caught dumping 3,000 tons of toxic mercury-laden waste in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, that originated at a PVC plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In 2012, the company became infamous again when it unsuccessfully sued Ben-Jei Tsuang, a professor at the Department of Environmental Engineering in National Chun Hsing University, who published a paper linking high cancer rates in Mailiao,Taiwan, to toxic dioxin and heavy metals air pollution from the Six Naphtha Cracking plant.

Image

PVC plants operated by Formosa in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in Point Comfort, Texas, have also been subject to numerous protests over pollution and elevated cancer rates. Several workers have also been injured and others killed in explosions at the Point Comfort plant in 2005 and at a PVC plant in Illiopolis, Illinois in 2004.

In 2018, the company announced plans to build a $10 billion complex named ‘The Sunshine Project,’ with 10 chemical manufacturing plants, in St. James Parish, Louisiana, in ‘Cancer Alley,' an 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi river with over 150 toxic petrochemical plants. Organizations such as EarthJustice and Rise St. James successfully sued to subject Formosa to an environmental review over the 800 tons of toxic air pollutants as well as the 13.6 million tons of greenhouse gases that the project is expected to emit annually.

(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Formosa's plant in Baton Rouge. Note that auto-display of data from this link may be disabled for some browsers. If so, copy the URL manually into a new browser window to see it.)

Formosa was fined $500 million in Vietnam after the company admitted dumping toxic waste in at its steel plant in Ky Anh that resulted in a massive fish kill along a 120 mile stretch of Vietnam's central coast.

Image

To learn more about Formosa, see the CorpWatch Gulliver profile here. A complete list of CorpWatch's Cancer Alley profiles may be accessed here.