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Nearly 20 years ago, in the middle
of the night, a toxic cloud of gas from a Union Carbide pesticides
plant crept over Bhopal, India. More than 3,800 people died within
days of the leak; thousands more were injured.
Because Union Carbide was an American company, U.S. chemical
industry leaders were especially shocked when they learned about
the disaster. They vowed they would do all they could to ensure
that such a disaster never happened again. With the Responsible
Care program, industry leaders say they have taken their best
shot. But critics insist they have not done enough and are just
blowing smoke.
Arguments over what really happened in Bhopal nearly 20 years ago on the night of Dec. 3 continue to this day. Certain facts are painfully clear: A toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate gas emanated from the plant. Reports indicated that workers were cleaning a storage tank containing 15 metric tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC, which is an ingredient used to manufacture the pesticide carbaryl, sold under the name Sevin.
During the operation, investigators theorize, water entered
the tank, creating an exothermic reaction. Pressure in the tank
rose, causing MIC vapors to burst open a pressure valve. A backup
scrubber and flair tower failed to work. Four tons of MIC vaporized
and enveloped half of Bhopal, then a city of 800,000.
As an environmental nightmare or human tragedy, Bhopal was
not unique. Other appalling industrial tragedies had preceded
it. Each one extracted an enormous toll in human suffering and
on the environment that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
In 1947, a ship holding fertilizer blew up in the Texas City,
Texas, harbor, killing 600 people and leveling a Monsanto
chemical plant. In the late 1960s, thousands of residents near
Minamata Bay in Japan developed symptoms of mercury poisoning,
the result of wastes dumped into the bay by Chisso
Corp.
In 1976, a pesticide plant explosion in Seveso, Italy, exposed
thousands of residents to cancer-causing dioxin. In the late 1970s,
toxins from a Hooker Chemical waste site, Love Canal, sickened
residents living in homes built on top of the one-time chemical
dump.
But the Bhopal accident stands out. Bhopal was quick and it
was deadly. It didn't take months or years for effects to appear
or for investigators to gather enough proof to fix blame on an
offending company, as in the Minamata incident. Like the Texas
City disaster, the Bhopal incident was a sudden, deadly, industrial
accident of unimaginable proportions.
In 1989, Union Carbide paid $470 million to Madhya Pradesh,
the Indian state of which Bhopal is the capital, to settle liability
claims. In 1994, it sold its 51%-owned subsidiary, Union Carbide
India, to MacLeod Russell of Calcutta. Today, survivors and their
representatives continue to press claims for cleanup and medical
bills, demanding $1 billion in compensation from Dow
Chemical, which bought Union Carbide in 2001.
More than the incidents that preceded it, Bhopal raised a host
of legitimate questions on the handling of hazardous chemicals
in a socially responsible manner. Today, it also raises questions
about the vulnerability of chemical plants to terrorist activities.
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Hind
PHOTO BY CHERYL HOGUE |
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SOME ARGUED
that Bhopal was an example of how technology transfer
to a developing country could fail. However, another potentially
deadly accident poked holes in that argument. A smaller but frighteningly
similar leak in 1985 of aldicarb oxime from a Union Carbide carbaryl
pesticide plant in Institute, W.Va., sent 135 people to the hospital.
That incident proved that a potentially deadly chemical accident
could occur in an "advanced" country.
Robert A. Roland, president of the Chemical Manufacturers Association--the
chemical industry trade association now named the American
Chemistry Council (ACC)--between 1978 and 1993, has said that
Bhopal "clearly put the spotlight on the global characteristic
of the chemical industry. We're everywhere." In a 1995 oral interview
deposited at the Chemical
Heritage Foundation's Othmer
Library in Philadelphia, Roland said, "What [our association]
did in Bhopal was, for the first time, to become the command center
for a major issue that affected the entire industry."
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Sadler
SOLVAY PHOTO |
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According to Roland, the industry's first substantial reaction
was to establish the Community Awareness & Emergency Response
(CAER) program. "We're good at emergency response," he said. "We
can put the lid on the pots, we can put the fires out, and we can
have mutual assistance and all that stuff. It's the community awareness
part where we are weak." A year later, U.S. industry leaders
also adopted the Canadian Responsible Care program, a combination
of management systems and codes of conduct that govern functions
such as chemical transportation, process safety, pollution prevention,
product stewardship, and employee health and safety. The industry
incorporated the CAER program into Responsible Care as part of
its master plan to pull together and avoid another tragedy like
Bhopal.
In an interview with C&EN late last year, Whitson Sadler,
retired chief executive officer of Solvay America, said that shortly
after the Bhopal accident, Union Carbide's chairman, Robert D.
Kennedy, suggested that the U.S. industry should adopt Responsible
Care. Kennedy said it could be the industry's action plan to prevent
chemical accidents. Some would say Kennedy's suggestion was well
intentioned; the cynics would call it ironic.
Sadler's own reaction to Responsible Care as a member of the
Chemical Manufacturers Association board, was, "My God, Carbide
has a tragedy in Bhopal, and we're going to have to spend millions
to put in Responsible Care." But Sadler said industry leaders
considered the idea seriously, "and I now think it is one of the
most important things the industry has done."
However, Anna Aurilio, legislative director for the U.S.
Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), an advocacy group,
says, "The chemical industry's so-called Responsible Care plan
lets the fox guard the chicken coop." The group contends that
the industry's safety record shows that voluntary measures do
not work to ensure public safety.
Brian Wastle, vice president of Responsible Care at the Canadian
Chemical Producers Association--the group that developed Responsible
Care in the early 1980s--bristles at Aurilio's suggestion that
the chemical industry manipulates government regulators. In Canada,
government officials sat in on the design of the group's third-party
verification program, he says. "It's not just self-regulation.
It's a team of foxes and chickens doing the right thing."
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Yosie
PHOTO BY CHERYL HOGUE |
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Citing more than 20 years of oil and chemical spill data from the
National Response
Center, U.S. PIRG also contends that ACC members have had an
average of 1,800 accidents per year with no downward trend. In
a report in April titled "Irresponsible Care: How the Chemical
Industry Fails To Protect the Public from Chemical Accidents,"
the group said the industry should be substituting inherently safer
chemicals and processes to eliminate potential accidents.
"Good, smart people who work for chemical companies would do
the right thing," Aurilio suggests. "But without legislation to
hold these firms to account, the smart people won't have their
chance." Because chemical firms refuse to change the way they
do things, an accident or sabotage at any one of 120 chemical
facilities could put more than 1 million people at risk of injury
or death, Aurilio says.
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Reilly
PHOTO BY MARC REISCH |
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"Responsible Care is essentially a public relations strategy that
doesn't address the real issues," says Satinath Sarangi, a member
of the International
Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. A founder of the Bhopal Group
for Information & Action, Sarangi says he was among the first
responders to do relief work after the accident 20 years ago.
Having seen "the devastation firsthand," Sarangi says the industry
should be putting more effort not just into developing safer products
and processes, but also into providing more complete information
on chemical hazards to workers and chemical plant neighbors.
Rick Hind, legislative director for the environmental group
Greenpeace,
agrees with Aurilio and Sarangi. He says the public is no safer
today than it was 20 years ago. The threat of lawsuits--not the
Responsible Care program--has been the biggest deterrent to practices
that might lead to accidents that hurt people or the environment,
Hind asserts.
THE INDUSTRY, Hind charges, has successfully
lobbied the Bush Administration and Congress to lighten up on
regulations. The government should instead actively regulate or
even ban outright the production of hazardous chemicals. It should
force the industry to innovate and develop environmentally friendly,
inherently safer green chemistry processes that are needed in
the 21st century, Hind argues.
Hind and other environmental activists have many good reasons
to be concerned about chemical company operations. Accidents still
happen. In late April, an explosion at a Formosa
Plastics plant in Illiopolis, Ill., left four employees dead
and four injured. About 1,000 residents surrounding the polyvinyl
chloride plant had to be evacuated.
Though Formosa is not an ACC member and therefore not required
to follow all Responsible Care codes, the firm is nevertheless
a chemical company. The public makes no distinction between companies
that follow Responsible Care codes and those that do not.
"Our members get blamed for the shortcomings of the rest of
the industry. Government needs to do more to crack down on companies
that don't adopt Responsible Care," says Terry F. Yosie, ACC's
vice president for Responsible Care. Both ACC and Synthetic
Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association members must implement
the Responsible Care program as a condition of membership. "We
support regulatory action against companies that do not adopt
Responsible Care," Yosie asserts.
"Inherently safer chemistry is one of the early concepts woven
into Responsible Care," he points out. For instance, soon after
the Bhopal accident, Carbide changed the manufacture of its pesticide
Sevin so that the MIC required for its production was consumed
as fast as it was manufactured; thus no MIC was stored on a plant
site.
Yosie says evidence of Responsible Care's success is that the
industry has not experienced any accidents on the same order of
magnitude as Bhopal. "ACC members' safety record over the past
decade is four times better than the average for the entire manufacturing
sector," he says, referring to Bureau
of Labor Statistics worker safety data. They show that all
chemical industry companies, including those that are not ACC
members, have incident rates of one-half that of manufacturing
as a whole.
ACC says its members, which account for 90% of U.S. chemical
production, have also cut by more than half their releases of
toxic chemicals into air, land, and water between 1988 and 2001.
And the group adds that its members have cut toxic emissions,
which must be reported to the government, even as they increased
production by 25% over the same period.
Even though workers and the communities surrounding plants
are safer than they were 20 years ago, "we can't assure people
that accidents will never happen," explains Michael E. Campbell,
chairman, president, and CEO of Arch
Chemicals. "But I can assure you that we are working hard
to make chemical plants safer both in the U.S. and globally."
Campbell, who is also chairman of ACC's executive committee and
who last year was chair of the board committee on Responsible
Care, says all chemical companies should commit themselves to
the Responsible Care program to mark the Dec. 3 anniversary of
the Bhopal accident.
TO CRITICS
who call for an immediate switchover to green chemistry
practices, Campbell says there is no simple answer. For instance,
an Arch plant searched for years to find a safe replacement for
carbon tetrachloride, a solvent it uses in one of its manufacturing
processes. The difficulty, he says, is "in switching to something
safer while not creating other risks." Saying that you are adopting
green chemistry is good public relations, "but if it doesn't change
your risk profile, then it has no true meaning," he says.
Responsible Care "sets us apart from other industries," says
Fran Keeth, president and CEO of Shell
Chemical. Keeth, who succeeded Campbell as chair of the ACC
board committee on Responsible Care, adds that the industry program
is intended to "keep us focused on creating safe conditions for
workers and plant communities."
Thomas E. Reilly Jr., who took over temporarily as president
and CEO of ACC when Gregori Lebedev resigned on June 1, tells
C&EN that Responsible Care "as an ethic has gone a long way"
to making the industry a safer one. "We have certainly done a
lot to improve our dialogue with our immediate neighbors, local
emergency providers, and local officials," adds Reilly, who until
he retired about a year ago was chairman and CEO of specialty
chemical maker Reilly Industries.
Criticism of the chemical industry has "gone away from our
distribution and our plants and processes and has now moved onto
the secondary derivative impact of our products," Reilly says.
The critics are more concerned, he says, with the cumulative effect
of synthetic chemicals that appear in minute quantities in human
tissue.
"That says to me," Reilly continues, that "we have made substantial
progress in terms of our plants, processes, and distribution.
When our communications program gets off the ground, I think we'll
talk a lot about product issues." In late April, ACC's board of
directors authorized $20 million to be spent on a long-planned
advertising and communications program.
Speaking at a Responsible Care conference early last month
before he resigned, Lebedev said, "Our critics can't stand that
our performance has improved. It drives them nuts." The continuing
barrage of criticism from environmentalist activists "tells us
a lot about our critics. It discredits them in the public domain."
Lebedev also told his audience that Tom Ridge, secretary of
the Department of Homeland
Security, complimented Responsible Care as a "model" program.
"We've asked Congress to step in and bring everyone up to the
same Responsible Care standards," Lebedev said. Congress and U.S.
government agencies such as the Environmental
Protection Agency have written 75% of Responsible Care's requirements
into government regulations, ACC's Yosie tells C&EN.
In fact, Congress has a history of incorporating industry initiatives
into the law of the land. As far back as 1986, Congress passed
the Emergency Planning & Community Right To Know Act. It required
that companies not only report accidental releases of more than
300 toxic chemicals, but also essentially adapt the community
emergency response initiatives outlined in the industry's CAER
program.
"We're looking to get ahead of government," Yosie adds. "We
want to become a resource for government agencies. We want them
to model their activities on what we've done."
TO ADDRESS
terrorism concerns, the U.S. Coast Guard recently recognized
the Responsible Care security code as an acceptable security alternative
to requirements outlined in the Marine Transportation Security
Act of 2002, Yosie points out. ACC is also on the verge of an
agreement with EPA that would streamline the process for Responsible
Care companies to join Performance
Track, which is an EPA program that, for instance, lowers
costs and speeds up the process of obtaining emissions permits
for companies that go beyond basic regulatory compliance requirements.
Not everyone is so sure that Responsible Care ought to be used
as a tool to expedite EPA reviews. Elaine Giessel, an environmental
consultant and community advocate, says she is upset about the
ACC's efforts to use Responsible Care as "a substitute for regulatory
control." ACC, she says, had years ago promised not to use the
Responsible Care program in that way.
Giessel questions whether Responsible Care can actually prevent
another Bhopal. "The industry hasn't done much research on reactive
chemicals, safety has not been addressed well, and the industry
is still not where it needs to be regarding plant security."
OVER TIME, Giessel maintains, ACC has put
less emphasis on community involvement in Responsible Care and
has attempted instead to reach key decisionmakers. Pointing to
the advertising campaign soon to get under way, she says: "It's
about influence and money spent on reputation. I'm very concerned."
ACC seems less concerned now with reaching plant communities
than it was in the program's early years, Giessel says. ACC abandoned
its Public Advisory Panel, made up of community activists and
environmental group representatives, and instead put together
a Leadership Dialogue Panel of influential opinion leaders. She
is the only member of the original Public Advisory Panel, dissolved
in 2001, to sit on the now two-year-old leadership panel.
Valve leaks and human error occur regularly at chemical plants,
Giessel says. She knows this because she is a member of Bayer's
Community Advisory Panel in Kansas City. Chemical companies sponsor
about 300 such panels in the U.S. in an effort to learn about
community concerns and keep local residents informed about plant
operations. "They don't want to talk about hazards, but about
risks," Giessel says.
ACC maintains that the arguments over hazards are essentially
irrelevant because hazards can be contained, Giessel says. But
the way she sees it, "Responsible Care doesn't eliminate human
error," and, therefore, it doesn't eliminate the potential for
disaster.
On the other hand, the European Union's proposed regulatory
framework for chemicals, REACH--Regulation,
Evaluation & Authorization of Chemicals--assumes that
hazardous chemicals can't be managed, Giessel says. She is not
sure that REACH and its precautionary principle are the final
answer to preventing another Bhopal, she says, but ACC should
more directly confront the hazards involved in chemical production.
Gilbert Omenn, who is also on ACC's Leadership Dialogue Panel,
says his impression is that the chemical industry is concerned
about issues such as security and the risk of a chemical accident.
Omenn is a professor of medicine and public health at the University
of Michigan and chaired the President's Commission on Risk
Assessment & Risk Management between 1994 and 1997. He is
also on the board of directors of specialty chemicals firm Rohm
and Haas. "We have lots of vulnerabilities. We live in an open
society," Omenn says.
Like ACC, the Canadian Chemical
Producers Association, which owns the Responsible Care trademark,
also has its panel of advisers. Its National Advisory Panel includes
community activists, academicians, an epidemiologist, an economist,
and even a labor union staff member. Brian Kohler, the health,
safety, and environment representative of the Communications,
Energy & Paperworkers Union of Canada, has an interesting
outsider's take on the chemical industry's efforts to prevent
another Bhopal.
The Responsible Care program has "made people more aware of
the potential for another accident like Bhopal," he says, and
that's all for the best. Although parts of Responsible Care are
encoded as law, it "depends heavily on good will and voluntary
standards." And because not every chemical firm or oil refinery
subscribes to the program, it is flawed.
"The missing ingredient," Kohler says, "is a government regulatory
framework to make safety stick." And he sees some hope that government,
industry, and labor leaders might one day agree on a suitable
regulatory framework. "Not everyone in the chemical industry is
opposed to regulation," he says. "It's the same for car drivers,
who are not all opposed to speed limits."
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