DuPont Has Spread Pollution Around the World. Now Aims to Sell Water Filters | Hacker News Reader

DuPont Has Spread Pollution Around the World. Now Aims to Sell Water Filters

theintercept.com

68 pointsetiam18 comments

I'm not sure for how long, but DuPont has been making water filters for some time. Since at least 2014 [1]

Ironic? Okay, sure. A little evil? Fine. But, the headline is garbage.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141003205844/http://www.dupont...

Wasn't there a recent story in the news where a major producer of legal opioids, started also producing the methadone to wean addicts off them? Wish I could find a reference

Yes, it was Richard Sackler, former chairman and president at Purdue Pharma (his company still owns a major stake in the company). They produced Oxy under his leadership, arguable contributing in a substantial way to the current opioid crisis. Sackler recently patented a fast-acting form of buprenorphine, a drug used to control opioid cravings.

Truly sociopathic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/t...

Truly sociopathic.

Let me get this straight. You're positing that a single person pushed Oxy so hard in the 70s, intentionally getting people addicted so that one day, some 40 years later, he might patent one of many drugs that helps deal with withdraw symptoms?

That is quite the long, convoluted con.

Purdue, under Sackler's leadership, has misrepresented the impact of opioid use and addiction for decades.

Now, they're selling a treatment.

Did they always plan to sell the treatment? Likely not. Is it unconscionable that after profiting off addicting millions of people to a drug, they are now trying to get their slice of the cure? Yes, absolutely.

This still doesn't demonstrate sociopathic behavior.

Is it unconscionable that after profiting off addicting millions of people to a drug, they are now trying to get their slice of the cure? Yes, absolutely.

Hard disagree. That they haven't been properly punished for past crimes doesn't make it unreasonable for them to continue doing business.

Methadone is a legal opioid.

Garbage are corporate boards. This should be fined under malicious intent or worse.

Dow Chemical, Dupont and DownDuPont have had their hands in an absurd amount of things.

Dupont alone has made rifles, smokeless powder for ammunition and kevlar... is this a conspiracy? No.

Is working with chemicals and materials for a couple of centuries then making filtration products a conspiracy? No. In fact, it may actually be a commercialization of something they developed for internal use to pollute less.

Story is written by an "environmental crime" reporter, so I'm going to assume is slanted from the start.

Other posters have already said it: Story is DuPont's waster solutions segment is opening a reverse osmosis water filter factory in Saudi Arabia, but it's a conspiracy because a completely unrelated spill at a DuPont plant happened a few years ago in New Jersey.

I cover petrochemicals daily, and I get really irate when non-industry reporters decide to be Erin Brokovich and try to "expose the evil chemical companies" who are allegedly bringing about the destruction of life as we know it.

"DuPont has spread pollution around the world"

So have people in Third World countries whose growing middle class have greatly outstripped their rudimentary waste management. Go complain about the Asian fishers who cut lines and throw garbage in the water.

I’m pretty sure this is a story about a desalination plant in the desert. Made by a company (Dow) which has been making these plants forever, which happened to have merged with DuPont a few years ago.

I mean there’s plenty to be outraged about in the world, and DuPont certainly is an infamous target, but this is clickbait.

The good ol' brewing the poison and selling the cure. I thought racketeering was outlawed?

Creating the demand and the supply. It’s genius in a sociopathic way, but truly amoral. Maybe they could just clean up their own messes and we wouldn’t need the filters?

Why would they do that when we'll happily pay them to keep pumping out poison and selling us water filters?

Did you mean immoral?

They both fit, but I did mean amoral which is a bit different. Someone who is immoral is breaking/doing something against their conscience, whereas someone who is amoral has no conscience.

Not trying to defend DuPont or anything. But I think the simplest explanation here is not that there is some conspiracy or agenda like the headline implies - but rather that DuPont has been simply developing new compounds and materials, finding markets for them and improving use cases for them in various industrial applications where they bring unique utility (which they absolutely do).

In that process there has been gross negligence regarding burying, hiding or dismissing data of these compounds' potential to impact human health and broader environment. But this move to expand into water filters is simply them taking their skill set as a company and using it to grow in a new and expanding market: providing impurity free drinking water.

> In that process there has been gross negligence regarding burying, hiding or dismissing data of these compounds' potential to impact human health and broader environment.

Why sandwich this?

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