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.