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Shell Pesticide Revelations

Shell knew early on what a potential long term and persistent environmental and health menace these pesticides were. Yet they kept producing them and moving production to new locations even as one country after another banned their use. This is a very ugly story of corporate greed and utter contempt for the welfare of their employees and the consuming public in general.

Comments from a former employee of Shell Oil USA on the article…

Roll call of Shell toxic brands deadly to insects, crop pests AND humans

These are my thoughts and observations about your revelations so far.

I found out that Shell has a fairly large petrochemical complex at Pernis, in the Netherlands. I also found out they mfg’d the ‘drins’ at this location for a long time. I am going to guess that Shell’s long term medical study was conducted on plant workers who were exposed to the ‘drins’ as part of their normal work duties. I am also going to guess these workers had no idea how toxic the ‘drins’ could be, or how potentially carcinogenic, or the kind of nervous system damage they could suffer. It would be interesting to find out how Shell conducted their ‘long term study’, and whether they did follow up studies after an employee left the company. They could have also done a study of the workers at the Rocky Mtn. Arsenal plant as well and kept the results secret.

I wonder who was ‘der weiße Engel’, at Shell, i.e., who was their corporate equivalent of Dr. Joseph Mengele‘ (aka the Angel of Death)? Names please.

The fact that Shell moved their production to Brazil in 1977 indicates that they still wanted the profits generated by the product.  Screw the long term environmental damage and potential health effects on the consuming public. Production was shut down in the States in 1975 so they needed a new plant. The fact that the area around the Brazilian plant was heavily polluted by pesticides when they sold the plant to Cyanamid in the early 1990’s indicates they did not give ‘a fat rat’s ass’ about the adverse effects on the health of the plant workers. The priority was profits, not worker safety. The Brazilians are a mixed race nation, and most of the workers were probably ‘non-white’. So there are serious racial (neo-colonialist) overtones to all of this. Why didn’t Shell do studies of these plant workers? Were they afraid of the results? Perhaps they did do studies, and they are still secret. I am certain these workers were exposed to higher daily and long term doses of the pesticides than the ‘study objects’ at the Pernis facility.

It read the article about BASF’s contention that the problem was created by Shell and that they shouldn’t be held liable. That is utter crap and they know it. They knew the plant site was heavily contaminated when they bought it, and they could have cleaned it up (at great expense) or closed it down (not likely) if they were concerned about the health effects on plant workers. They obviously weren’t. They are as culpable as Shell, and they have the same ‘blood on their hands’ as Shell. BASF didn’t give a crap about worker health safety either.

And I bet that THEY (Shell, Cyanamid and BASF) thought that because Brazil was a third world country they could pretty much do what the wanted, and buy off whom ever they needed to buy off.

These pesticides are extremely persistent in the environment.  It seems from what I have looked so far that Shell want to know how much of this stuff was an ‘acceptable dosage’ on a daily basis, and how much a person’s body could store before adverse health effects began to show up. In other words, they wanted to know how much of this ‘poison’ an average person could consume and not be affected in the short term. Shell management clearly did not care that they were, in effect, well along in the process poisoning the entire frigging planet.

Shell knew early on what a potential long term and persistent environmental and health menace these pesticides were. Yet they kept producing them and moving production to new locations even as one country after another banned their use. This is a very ugly story of corporate greed and utter contempt for the welfare of their employees and the consuming public in general.

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