DuPont began as a gunpowder factory after the DuPont family moved to the United States in 1802. The money for it was given to the emigrants by good friends of the family - French Masons: the financier Jacques Necker and the Marquis de Lafayette, because the elder brother of the company's founder was the Grand Treasurer of the Delaware Masonic Lodge.
In 1902, the gunpowder giant began producing paints and plastics. In 1903, a scientific division appeared that was engaged in the development of promising chemical technologies. A lot of funds were allocated for his work, and employees were allowed to engage not only in applied, but also in fundamental scientific research. It was there that cellophane, freon, teflon, nylon, lycra, kevlar and other useful materials were born.
By the mid-1930s, DuPont was making a bunch of everything, including synthetic fabrics and bleach. True, the promotion of these two products was hampered by hemp - paper, clothing, shoes, ropes, ropes, threads were made from it. The area under her crops was millions of hectares.
Hemp
In 1935, DuPont chemists invented nylon, which became a powerful competitor to hemp yarn. Hemp has long irritated company representatives, if only because the paper made from it, unlike paper made from wood, did not require bleaching. This means that the reagents that the chemical giant produced were not needed. And the company's chemists have launched a broad offensive against cannabis.
The media mogul William Hirst, who owned a huge number of newspapers and magazines, as well as many wood paper factories, was taken into the allies. From now on, in the Hirst newspapers, and later in all the others, hemp was called only in Mexican - marijuana. And they spoke of it no longer as an agricultural crop, but as a most harmful drug.
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The goals, means, tactics and strategy of the fight against cannabis were calculated absolutely precisely, and already in the second half of the 1930s in the United States and many other countries, its cultivation was strictly prohibited and even amounted to a criminal offense. On the other hand, sales of nylon and paper bleaches have grown several times.
Freon
Sometimes the company deliberately went to the destruction of its own inventions, but this destruction led to its next growth. It happened with freon.
Freon was created in 1931. The substance was non-toxic, non-flammable and non-corrosive, and in addition, simple and cheap to manufacture. It was used in the production of air conditioners and refrigeration units, aerosol preparations, for the creation of foaming compositions, in synthetic detergents, construction, mechanical engineering, the aviation industry and spacecraft.
For a long time, only DuPont produced freon, but in the end, others received the right to release it. With the advent of competition, the market was saturated, demand fell, and DuPont's revenues fell with it. The solution to the problem could be the transition to new gases patented by the concern, such as the Suva cooler for refrigerators and air conditioners and the Dymel propellant for aerosols. True, they had disadvantages compared to freon - they were several times more expensive and at the same time worse. As a result, they did not particularly want to buy them.
And then it suddenly turned out that freon is terribly harmful to the environment. Studies by American scientists have been published that it is this gas that is responsible for the ozone hole discovered in 1957. Consumer organizations began to urge ordinary people to boycott aerosol deodorants, “greens” picketed chemical plants, states signed pacts to reduce the use of freon-containing substances. In 1985, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was signed, two years later - the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. In 1990, a full trade embargo was imposed on Freon.
Now attention: DuPont was the initiator of the creation of the Montreal Protocol.
As a result of his actions, the firm
instantly bankrupted a huge number of small competitors engaged in the production of freon;
established sales of more expensive and more profitable products;
forced the whole world to change refrigerators and air conditioners, utilizing freon and buying "environmentally friendly" ones.
By 2005, in the USA alone, refrigerators were “exchanged” for more than $ 220 billion. Russia, in accordance with the Montreal Agreement, has not produced freon since 1996, but buys its substitutes from DuPont.
Meanwhile, the complete innocence of Freon in the creation of the ozone hole has long been proven. Because the hole did not appear at all, but always existed. And freon can destroy ozone only in a laboratory test tube, because it is four times heavier than air, therefore, once it enters the atmosphere, it does not rise to a height of 30 km, where the ozone layer is located, but sinks into the lowlands. In addition, it is absolutely incomprehensible why a hole is formed over Antarctica, in which there are no freon emissions and cannot be by definition, and over large cities, where there are tons of freon, no holes are recorded.
Asbestos
A similar story happened around the same time with asbestos - it was unexpectedly accused of causing irreparable harm to human health.
The dangerous properties of asbestos became known at the beginning of the last century, when a worker of one of the British quarries was found to have a disease similar to pneumonia, provoked by asbestos dust, called "asbestosis." By a strange coincidence, this disease did not worry society until the European reserves of asbestos were depleted and the USSR became its main supplier.
It was then that the public sounded the bells. Research has shown that asbestos can cause not only asbestosis, but also cancerous tumors. The mineral was immediately included in the group of substances with reliably proven carcinogenic properties. In the media, there were several shock materials about the terrible effects of asbestos on the human body.
Europe began to demolish buildings that were built using asbestos, and to replace slate on roofs, because it was in slate that the share of the dangerous substance was especially high. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent. In the end, the European Commission banned the use of asbestos altogether.
Oddly enough, but such a ban had opponents, for example, the World Health Organization. WHO was surprised that out of more than 300 substances included in the "dangerous" list, far from the most dangerous was chosen for the ban. Indeed, even in order to get sick with asbestosis, it is necessary not only to work with asbestos for a long time, but to breathe fine asbestos dust for at least 15 years, and cancerous tumors appear already as a complication of asbestosis. And asbestosis itself is an extremely rare disease: over the past 30 years in Russia and Canada, the countries in which asbestos was most widely used, not a single case of the disease has been recorded.
One interesting circumstance strikes the eye: the "asbestos persecution" began after a DuPont employee invented a synthetic substitute for asbestos - nomex. After the ban, it was he who became the main fire-fighting and refractory material (firefighters' suits are sewn from it, they cover everything that needs to be protected from fire).
The company is now moving away from its aging chemical business and moving to a more promising biotech business. At the very end of the last century, she bought the world's largest plant growing company Pioneer Hi-Bred International and the producer of soy protein Protein Technologies International.
Teflon
The US Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has banned Teflon-coated pans. In laboratory experiments with animals that were injected with large doses of one of the components of the coating, it turned out that these substances contributed to the occurrence of liver cancer, low birth weight, and caused problems with the immune system and the development process.
Teflon is one of the best-selling industrial products that has found applications in kitchenware, aerospace and textiles, heart valves, electronics, and microwave popcorn bags.
Nevertheless, manufacturers were told about the need to reduce production of Pfoa acid by 95% until 2010 and then systematically complete its production by 2015, writes the Italian La Stampa.
The US agency said it will continue to investigate the health effects of this component to see if additional measures are needed.
“Science studies all the qualities of Pfoa, but there are concerns, and therefore minimizing the effects of using this substance is a perfectly fair decision, both from an environmental and human health point of view,” said Susan Hazen, EPA Deputy Head of Pesticides.
DuPont, one of the companies to which the claim was made, said research by its experts and some independent scientists showed that pans and other items made from its materials were quite reliable.
And yet, eight Teflon-based businesses agreed to the program: 3M, Dyneon Arkema, AGC Chemicals, Asahi Glass, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Clariant, Daikin and Solvay Solexis.
Small addition:
Dupont napalm and defoliants were used by the US Army during the Vietnam War.
DuPont made more than $ 20 billion from the freon scam alone.
According to the Toxic 100 rating, formed by the Political Economy Research Institute (USA), as of August 2013, DuPont was in the 1st place among the companies that most pollute the environment in the USA.
DuPont, the world's largest manufacturer of genetically modified products, launched the production of seeds and fertilizers in Russia.
Author's comment
On August 20, 2018, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg decided she would not go to school until politicians pay attention to the drought and wildfires in Sweden caused by global warming. There were about three weeks left before the parliamentary elections in the country. Greta picked up a homemade poster with the slogan Skolstrejk For Klimate and a stack of printed flyers with a short text explaining why she spent school hours outside the Riksdag building: “We kids often don't listen to what adults tell us to do. … We act like adults. And if you adults don't care about my future, then I don't care either. My name is Greta and I am in ninth grade. And I refuse to go to school until the parliamentary elections in the country."
On the same day, the Riksdag began writing about the girl on social networks. By the end of the week, several dozen people had joined the protest, some MPs expressed support for Greta, and the strike was covered by the leading Swedish media and local television.
Greta plans to go on strike until the Swedish government takes the necessary measures to keep the average temperature rise on the planet within 2 ° C. Greta did not take these numbers from the ceiling - these requirements were developed by scientists for the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, and they are quite real. To achieve this result, Thunberg proposes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15%, as prescribed by the agreement.
Shl
I don’t mean to say that Greta Thunberg is the official (or unofficial) face of DuPont in a green campaign against traditional energy sources. After all, DuPont is still a chemical concern, not a producer of renewable energy sources. But here already, as in an old joke - spoons were found, but the sediment remained … Ie. not DuPont so someone else.
ZZY
The article is a compilation of different sources, so sorry if not all of them are listed.
Author: PersonaNonGrata