Dow Chemical

AS OF 2002, the Dow Chemical Company was one of the world's largest diversified chemicals and plastics companies with sales of $27.6 billion, employing approximately 50,000 people worldwide. The company supplied more than 3,400 chemical and plastic products to 170 countries.

Dow achieved notoriety during the 1960s as a supplier of napalm and the defoliant Agent Orange to U.S. armed forces serving in Vietnam. The “Dow Shall Not Kill” campaign was central to the development of the anti-war movement in the United States. During the 1980s, American Vietnam veterans sought damages from Dow and other manufacturers of Agent Orange because they alleged exposure to dioxin in Agent Orange had adversely affected their health. Campaigners also pursued the company through the courts for dioxin contamination, and poisoning the Great Lakes with mercury.

After a merger with the Union Carbide Corporation in 2001, Dow assumed Union Carbide's liability for asbestos-related claims. The company estimates that the cost of resolving pending and future claims during the period 2002–17 will be between $2.2 and $2.4 billion. The company is also potentially liable for claimed defects in breast implants and other silicone medical products, personal injury, and property damage caused by some chemical pesticides containing dibromochloropropane (DBCP), and the remediation and restoration of polluted manufacturing sites.

Formed in 1897 by Herbert Dow, the Dow Chemical Company produced chlorine bleach from waste brine from the Midland Chemical Company plant, an early venture. By 1900, the company had absorbed Midland Chemical and was an established chemical producer by 1910. The outbreak of World War I removed German competition in the U.S. market, and Dow expanded into the manufacture of dyestuffs.

The company poured money into research to maintain market leadership when the German chemical industry revived during the 1920s. Several new products entered the company portfolio as Dow Chemical followed a policy of progressive organic growth.

The demands of the U.S. military during World War II boosted the company still further. The company also began to expand internationally, forming Dow Chemical of Canada in 1942. During the following decade the company entered the important Japanese and European chemical markets. The story of Dow as a growth company came unstuck in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the summer of 1970, Dow stumbled into another controversy when the attorney general of Ohio asked the U.S. Supreme Court for leave to bring an action against Dow for mercury pollution. In 1969, a Norwegian graduate student published a research paper showing that mercury deposited in the Great Lakes could accumulate in the bodies of fish as highly toxic compounds. People eating large quantities of mercury-tainted fish risked severe mercury poisoning. Like other chemical and paper companies, Dow Canada flushed mercury spilled at manufacturing sites around the Great Lakes into the nearest body of water, believing that the mercury sank to the bottom and remained inert.

The government of Ontario, Canada, had already instituted proceedings against Dow Canada for mercury pollution during the spring. When commercial fishing was suspended, fisherman made individual claims and class-action claims for loss of livelihood. In 1985, Dow Canada faced a similar scandal after a government diver reported discovering a blob of perchloroethylene, a dry cleaning fluid, while sampling sediments in the St. Clair River during 1984.

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