Cancer Alley: Shintech profile

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Shin-Etsu is a chemical maker based in Tokyo, Japan, that was founded in 1926 in Nagano prefecture to make nitrogen fertilizer. Later it expanded into other products like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and semiconductor silicon. Shintech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shin-Etsu, opened a PVC factory in Freeport, Texas, in 1974 and proposed a new plant in Convent, Louisiana, but was defeated in 1998 by environmental justice activists after a massive fight over projected dioxin, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride pollution – all of which are known carcinogens.

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However, Shintech ultimately won approval of two other plants nearby – in Addis and Plaquemine that were constructed in 2000 and 2008 respectively and then expanded several times.

In 2008, Shintech was ordered to pay total penalties of over $12 million for air pollution in Freeport, and in December 2020, the company was ordered to pay $356,000 for incidents involving thousands of pounds of chemical releases and worker injuries over a dozen years at the Louisiana plants. Eight weeks after the Louisiana settlement, the state approved a $1.3 billion expansion of the company’s facilities in Plaquemine, but environmental justice activists have started to organize to try to stop it. Unfortunately local politicians in Iberville parish have not merely agreed to the Plaquemine expansion but approved a $110 million tax break for the company.

(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for ShinTech's plants in Addis and Plaquemine. 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.)

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Back in Japan, 16 factory workers were injured in an explosion at a Shin-Etsu cellulose factory in Niigata Prefecture in 2007. Also in 2019, two workers were injured in a fire at a Shin-Etsu silicon factory in Fukushima prefecture.

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