Talk:Dow Chemical Company

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Contents

[edit] The Bhopal Disaster -- TENUOUS Connection

Let me see if I understand the timeline as expressed here:

1984 - The disaster occurs, at a UCIL plant which, at this time, has absolutely no connection to Dow.

1994 - After reaching a $470 million settlement, Union Carbide sells off UCIL to another Indian company.

2001 - Dow purchases Union Carbide, which already settled more than seven years previously, and also sold off the responsible subsidiary more than seven years previously.

Can someone please tell me why this is even included in this entry? Other than the usual crew of corporation-haters, how does buying a company seventeen years after a disaster, and seven years after it has legally settled and divested itself of its own responsible subsidiary, justify the phrasing "negative publicity from the incident continues to be a substantial issue for Dow"?

Seems to me that this should be either clarified or deleted. --08:16, 30 September 2005 (UTC)Tavernknight

Good question. You are right that this is not clear, and much of it shouldn't be in this article (but rather in Bhopal Disaster or Union Carbide India, Limited). However, it pertains to Dow for the following reasons:

  1. Dow owns not only UCIL's assets and rights, but also its obligations.
  2. Arguably, UCIL did not fulfil its obligations. Many victims and survivors have not received appropriate compensation.
  3. Moreover, the problem is still ongoing under Dow's responsibility: "A November 2004 BBC investigation confirmed that the contamination is still active".

Common Man 18:00, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I also agree that the connection is really not explained very well, and the final sentence to that "It is worthy to note..." reads like a bad conclusion to a novel that was tacked on. I suggest that it be drastically cut down and I am going to try and do that now... 68.39.174.238 05:57, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

This report by Amnesty International holds Dow Chemicals responsible for the Bhopal disaster. AFAIK, there has been no independent study which absolves Dow or UCC of the responsibility for the Bhopal disaster. Panchhee 19:06, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Union Carbide sold all of its shares (50.9%) in Union Carbide India, Limited (UCIL) to McLeod Russel Ltd of Calcutta, which in turn belonged to the Williamson Magor Group. UCIL was renamed Eveready Industries India, Ltd and is "the flagship company" of the B.M. Khaitan Group. All of this occurred prior to Dow buying Union Carbide. Eveready Industries is the company which bought a majority share of the Bhopal plant, presumably its liabilities as well as assets, yet I have never heard mention of its liability for any part of the Bhopal disaster. Why is Dow treated so differently from Eveready? I have my suspicions, but I won't speculate. Can anyone explain the difference in treatment to me? Silverchemist 03:13, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

"As of 2005, a summons for Dow Chemical to appear in court to explain why it has failed to present its full subsidiary has been put on hold by a notoriously corrupt judge."

Who is the judge?

Jbacu1985 02:32, 26 September 2007 (UTC) The Amnesty International site now indicates that this 'Action is closed' (The link given above is no longer attached.)

[edit] Napalm

Perhaps it should be mentioned that Dow came under heavy fire (no pun intended) for producing napalm during the Vietnam war. That seems to be more relevant to the article than the Bohpal disaster. Descendall 10:18, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree! I was thinking the same thing. I especially like how the article says, "Dow's sales exceeded $1 billion in 1964, $2 billion in 1971, and $10 billion in 1980" without mentioning that the super-fast growth over this period was partially due to the fact that is was selling so much Napalm to the U.S. government.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.87.187.84 (talk • contribs)

Does anybody have real data about how much sales of Napalm were? I suspect that they are a miniscule portion of the $1 billion sales, and by 1980 I believe Dow no longer had the napalm contract Charles W. Bash 22:32, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Dow made naplam in one small plant in Torrance CA employing only ten people and that plant never made more than $5 million worth of napalm per year. The source for this is Reference 9 in the main article, p 352. Silverchemist 04:09, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Do your home work if you are going to make such harsh statements. In response to you not understanding why Bhopal is even mentioned, and your difficulty in finding any information; perhaps a reminder of the 20,000 deaths, one half million injured and current abandoned pesticide factory will help answer your question. Dow then (after acquiring Union Carbide)set their eyes on going back to West Bengal. There is a current law suit in India with a list of grievous offenses in which Dow has successfully avoided because the Indian Government has failed in their efforts to even get them to appear. The very people that were so injured are protesting their return. Understandably March 2008 L.Eyeing —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.126.120.105 (talk) 05:39, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Neutrality

The section on "Napalm" is highly suspect, it contains strange (unencyclopedic?) phrasings, possibly sensationalistic details, and has no direct citations, even for quotes that should be directly attributable. 68.39.174.238 06:03, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can we remove this?

An anonymous user has added this section. I reverted an earlier version of this, pointing out the tenuous connection, its relative unimportance and its lack of references, but it came back (albeit written better). I didn't want a revert war, and I figured we could leave it up for a few days while it is topical, but I would like to remove it for the following reasons:

  • For any massive multinational corporation of this size, at any time there must be thousands of people pissed off with the company, and Wikipedia shouldn't be a place for people to rant on about the evils of this or that company. I'm not saying Dow is perfect or not perfect, I just think this is an encyclopedia, not AdBusters.
  • The complaint the (now former) governor at this college has is that this person "used to be at Dow". I think it the person was currently high-up in Dow this story would carry much more weight.
  • I couldn't find any reference the other day on the UWBangor website or in a Google search - I should have thought if the story was at all notable, the university or a local newspaper would be forced to include a mention of it. If the Welsh papers don't consider it worth mentioning why should we? Why won't the person give us a reference on the story?
  • The story is certainly not important enough to appear before the "Overview" section!

I think this article should focus on this hugely important company, not on one guy who was upset because another guy used to work at this company at some time in the past (we think, we don't know). Walkerma 03:14, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

QUOTE: "Wikipedia shouldn't be a place for people to rant on about the evils of this or that company." This sounds fair enough, but the practical result of this editing policy will probably be a pro-corporation bias on Wikipedia. Like it or not, *most* corporations can be criticized (from a little to a whole lot) for their lack of social responsibility. Although I agree that a specific criticism of a particular corporation must build up some steam before it gets included on Wiki. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.87.187.84 (talk • contribs)

Yes, there should definitely be some room for criticism of Dow, and Napalm is a particularly nasty skeleton in the cupboard. It is from quite some time ago, which reduces its importance IMHO, but it's still recent enough to warrant inclusion, especially as it appears there were protests. We did have an extensive section on Dow controversies, which was removed in toto by some anonymous user (this page gets a lot of that!). I have restored nearly of that material, pruned down a little (we don't need to know which colleges saw protests 40 years ago on this very broad page!) - I don't think it's totally neutral, but much of it is well referenced and it's much better than having no mention.
By the way, the section I wanted removing (above) was nothing to do with Napalm, it was just polemic, and it was removed (by someone else) a day or two after I posted this request. You should be very careful, though, about making assertions like, "growth over this period was mainly due to...napalm" or even implying that. My guess is that it was a very small part of Dow's profits - not because I think they are so ethical, but simply that there was a lot more polyethylene and Saran Wrap produced than napalm. To link the profit growth to napalm seems absurd to me - don't forget that the chemical industry produces virtually all of the materials used in our modern society, and Dow is one of the biggest players - so you'd need to cite some very reputable sources before you could claim that Dow's growth came mainly from selling napalm rather than from selling Styrofoam and plastic grocery bags. Walkerma 03:59, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts. BTW, I actually said "partially due," not "mainly due." I may have said "mainly due" originally, but it only remained there for about 60 seconds, tops.

[edit] Environmental and human rights abuses

The section currently titled "controversies" should read "Environmental and human rights abuses", which is more accurate. Panchhee

[edit] Subsidiaries

Dow Chemicals has a lot of wholly and partially owned subsidiaries. Instead of an entire section devoted to a subsidiary(as in Dow Corning), it is better to have a list of subsidiaries. Panchhee


I agree that there should be a list of Dow's various subsidiaries. A suggestion for those with the trepidation to complete such task: Perhaps they can be sorted according to their industry? Redland19 (talk) 12:19, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Management

does anyone know when, a australian by the name of Geffory S. Norris was in charrge of the australian sector of DOW Chemicals? and a beleive that Andrew N. Liveris was hired in 1976 in Australia to work for DOW by Geff--Aebischer 11:15, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dow Corning

Shouldn't the Dow Corning information, including the section on breast implants, be in the Dow Corning article rather than the Dow article? Davost 12:14, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Not necessarily. There has been at least one court decsision that "pierces the corporate veil" between Dow Corning and Dow, and imposing liability on Dow as well as Dow Corning.--ukexpat 20:23, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

It's odd that there is no mention of Breast Implants on the page of Corning, Inc. 12.46.144.76 06:18, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Isn't Corning a completely separate company, nothing to do with Dow Corning other than the word Corning in the name? Walkerma 13:06, 28 July 2007 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia's article, and Dow Corning's own website, Dow Corning is half owned by Dow Chemical and half by Corning Incorporated, so Corning and Dow should be treated equally.Silverchemist 04:22, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Jbacu1985 02:53, 26 September 2007 (UTC) Per the 2005 10-K for The Dow Chemical Company filing "On October 6, 2005, all such cases then pending in the District Court against the Company were dismissed. Should cases involving Dow Corning’s breast implant and other silicone medical products be filed against the Company in the future, they will be accorded similar treatment." The Dow Chemical Company - 10-K Filing - 2005

[edit] The yes men

why is there no topic mentioning the run-ins that the Dow chemical company had with the THE YES MEN? they even managed to get on BBC as dow chemical's representatives offering to finally own up to their mistakes. I also read that it lead to a brief crash in the stock prices of DOW Chemical.Karthikceg 17:25, 14 August 2007 (UTC)


Their run-ins are mentioned in the entry for the Yes men. Redland19 (talk) 12:24, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] POV Paradise!

This is one of the most one-sided articles I have ever read--at least for a major entry. Shameful. 65.80.248.158 15:21, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Environmental record

The current section on Dow's impact on the environment needs work. It simply says that Dow is linked to the 96 of the worst toxic dump sites in the US and is trying to avoid clean-up costs. The cited reference (same one as in the current version) shows that 95 of those are shared sites, 15 have been listed by EPA as cleaned up and 69 have all the infrastructure and plans for cleanup in place. Nowhere does it mention any resistance to cleanup. I suggest that the following be used in place of the current paragraph: Silverchemist 15:42, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Dow Chemical is currently ranked tenth among corporations in a measure of toxicity of airborne pollutants emitted in the United States, releasing more than 14 million pounds of toxins per year into American air. (The statistics given are not correlated to the volume of production.) [1] According to United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents Dow has some responsibility for 96 of the United States' worst Superfund toxic waste dumps, in tenth place by number of sites. One of these, a mining site, is listed as the sole responsibility of Dow: all the rest are shared with numerous other companies. Fifteen sites have been listed by the EPA as finalized (cleaned up) and 69 are listed as "construction complete", meaning that all required plans and equipment for cleanup are in place.[2]

Jbacu1985 19:38, 28 September 2007 (UTC) I agree with the proposed paragraph. Also note that Dow and other industry participants payed into the Superfund until the end of 1995. Congress declined to extend the tax past that year.

[edit] Neutrality tag added

A lot of this article seems to be used to "bash" the company. While I (and many people) do not agree with a lot of the companies ways about some things, doesn't mean we can write a POV piece. Problems throughout the article. One thing that really stuck out to me is the "Advocacy" section. A collection of links only used to defame the company. How is that acceptable? If those links are going to be used to back up context within the article, okay, but Wikipedia is not a collection of links. - Rjd0060 19:19, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Jbacu1985 (talk) 04:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC) In addition to the "Advocacy" section, an number of other references point to advocacy/lobby group sites. It seems that this could be a concerted effort by lobby groups or members therein to add links to there websites to drum up traffic and improve their Google rankings. A suggestion is that the 'Advocacy' section be renamed 'Links to advocacy groups, lobbyists and hoaxes'.

I agree with that point, also. - Rjd0060 (talk) 07:45, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request for Comment

A lot of the article does not appear to be written in a neutral tone, paying special attention to the section titled "Advocacy" which appears to be a collection of links, whose content is not used throughout the article, and only purpose seems to be to attack the company. I'd like some outside views and opinions. Rjd0060 (talk) 23:42, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Comment An RFC is not appropriate here. You might awant to take it to the associated WikiProjects talk page, request a peer review or ask an editor personally--Phoenix-wiki (talk · contribs) 20:42, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll start a PR instead. - Rjd0060 (talk) 21:35, 23 November 2007 (UTC)