Dupont/3M did (and continue to do) a level of harm on par with CFCs and leaded gasoline, with complete regulatory impunity.
At some point the ICC needs to extend the crimes against humanity/nature to something like crimes against Human Health.
3M is on The Economist today with relevance to this matter:
> 3M, an American conglomerate, agreed to pay cities and utilities $12.5bn to settle thousands of lawsuits that had alleged chemicals emitted by the firm's products had polluted drinking-water supplies
1. Clean up PFAS from riverbeds and groundwater sediment.
2. Add PFAS cleaning stages in all water treatment systems across the globe.
At 12.5B, they are just paying up the people that can prove they now have cancer because of ridiculous exposure levels.
At 12.5B this is just the cost of doing business for Chem industry.
Probably not even that.
https://chemsec.org/reports/the-top-12-pfas-producers-in-the...
The top 12 PFAS producers in the world and the staggering societal costs of PFAS pollution
Only twelve companies account for a majority of the PFAS production in the world. PFAS production is hardly profitable, but the cost for society is massive.
If the true cost of this damage were paid, 3M would be driven to bancrupsy. Maybe then the next conpany would not be so gun-ho about dumping strange chemicals.
This is your regular reminder that many of the wealthy are only so, because they never pay for the consequences of their actions.
Littering was a social norm when these chemicals were invented. Even today, most Americans eat meat from factory farms, drive gas powered cars, and throw most trash in a landfill. Problems that will have to eventually be fixed.
If you’re born into this kind of society are you going to handicap yourself by holding yourself to a stricter set of rules than everyone else? The ‘yes’ and ‘no’s to that question don’t fall neatly into class lines.
Is this some stranhe double-hypocracy?
If 3M put their crap is a properly contained landfill, millions of people wouldn't be poisoned!
'Sins of the consumer' is a toxic ideology!
The political will didn’t exist for pfas back then, and it doesn’t exist for things like water scarcity, or antibiotic resistance, or e-waste today.
No new laws are needed.
This is not the case of finding loopholes in laws or pushing a problem off to the next generation, like climate change.
This is a corporation profiting off someone’s death and getting away with it.
So the laws worked just fine, they just need to be enforced better? That’s exactly what a lack of political will looks like.
The very pervasiveness argues against PFAS being that bad for humans in real life. Despite pretty much everyone having PFAS in their blood, at a global level, health is probably better than ever and most health problems are from refined sugars and sedentary lifestyle than anything that can be attributed to PFAS.
However, how do you go after people who have so much money they can literally buy their way out of any appropriate punishment? We need something stronger than the ICC.