Cancer Alley: Honeywell profile

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Honeywell International is a technology and manufacturing company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Founded in 1906, and long associated with thermostats, it also designed and manufactured cluster bombs; the electronic systems used to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945; as well as the controls for B-52 bombers, nuclear submarines, the MX intercontinental ballistic missiles, Pershing II and Trident nuclear missile systems. After the company became a primary target of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, Honeywell helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on the activists. After the activists sued the company for interfering with their right to protest, Honeywell agreed to pay for cluster bomb removal in Laos.

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Honeywell is listed as responsible or partially responsible for greatest number (128) of Superfund sites in the U.S. - sites judged to be the most toxic in the country by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In October 2021, a worker was killed from exposure to a toxic chemical at the Honeywell plant in Geismar, Louisiana, where 11 chemical leaks had been reported in three previous years due to equipment failures or improper setup.

(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Honeywell's plant in Geismar. 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.)

In 2006, Honeywell was fined $450 million after a century of industrial dumping from the Allied-Signal site on Lake Onondaga in New York state. In 2013, Honeywell paid $3 million for air pollution at a nylon manufacturing plant in Hopewell, Virginia. In 2019, Honeywell paid the state of Georgia $4 million for the pollution of coastal marsh land by the LCP Chemicals plant. Most recently, New Jersey state sued Honeywell in 2020 for its role in the contamination from coal tar, paving, and roofing material manufacturing at the Quanta Resources site on the Hudson River in Edgewater, New Jersey.

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