Chemicals & Manufacturing

Lawyers for a group of some 1,200 Nicaraguan banana plantation workers appeared before the Paris Trial Court in an effort to force Dow Chemical, Occidental Chemical and Shell Oil to pay $1 billion in compensation for health problems caused by Nemagon, a pesticide sold by the three companies. Read More

Stanka Becheva, a food and agriculture campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, speaks by video with Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch about the Meat Atlas 2021, a report that documents the methods and impacts of the meat industry, naming and shaming the small handful of companies that control it. Read More

Denka, the owners of the factory believed to be the major cause of cancer in a Louisiana neighborhood with the highest cancer rates in the United States, has been challenged over its failed efforts to weaken environmental standards and its claim that the factory has reduced toxic airborne emissions. Read More

CorpWatch executive director Pratap Chatterjee interviews Anna Feigenbaum, associate professor in Digital media & communication at Bournemouth University in the Southwest of England, on the role of private sector companies that manufacture riot control weaponry, used against protestors around the world. Read More

Over 100 consumer groups are calling on the U.S. Congress to ignore demands from business lobby groups - like the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - to enact laws guaranteeing corporations blanket immunity from coronavirus pandemic lawsuits. Proposals for such a law have been making the rounds for over a month. Read More

The companies that designed, manufactured, and installed cladding - a material used to wrap a building under construction - that caught fire at Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017, killing 72 people, have asked a UK public inquiry to award them immunity from prosecution, before they provide evidence. Read More

Representatives of some 280 indigenous nations have joined a protest on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to oppose the construction of an oil pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners. If completed, the Dakota Access Pipeline is expected to help move 570,000 barrels of crude daily to Illinois. Read More

Some 500 Angolan fisherfolk have demanded compensation from Chevron after an oil spill polluted the Mandarin and Mpuela shoreline in Cabinda last month, close to the California company's drilling operations. Under government orders, all fishing activity was banned for almost two weeks. Read More

Stora Enso - a Swedish paper manufacturing giant - has been blacklisted after investigations into its supply chain in Pakistan showed that the company was knowingly using child labor. In March, AP7, a major Swedish pension fund, sold off its $4.1 million stake in Stora. Read More

Calvin Bryant was crippled in a Imperial Sugar plant explosion in Savannah, Georgia, that also killed 14 of his co-workers. In a new CorpWatch investigation into federal contractors who win millions in government business despite violating workers rights, Chris Thompson tells his story. Read More