DuPont
From Freepedia
| Image:Logo dupont.gif | |
| Type | Public (NYSE: DD) |
| Founded | 1802 |
| Location | Wilmington, Delaware |
| Key people | Charles Holliday, Jr., CEO & Chairman |
| Industry | Chemicals - Plastics & Rubber |
| Products | Neoprene, Nylon, Lucite, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, and Tyvek |
| Revenue | Image:Green up.png$27.995 billion USD (2004) |
| Employees | 81,000 |
| Website | www.dupont.com |
- This article is about the DuPont company. For the other uses of DuPont, see Dupont (disambiguation).
E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company NYSE: DD was founded in July 1802 as a gun powder mill by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont on Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware, USA. DuPont has evolved into the world's second largest chemical company (behind Dow Chemical Company), and in the 20th century led the polymer revolution by developing many highly successful materials such as neoprene, nylon, Corian, Lucite, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, M5 fiber, Nomex, and Tyvek. DuPont has also been significantly involved in the refrigerant industry, developing and producing the Freon series and more modern environmentally-friendly refrigerants, and the color industry, creating synthetic pigments and paints like ChromaFlair. The company often gives trademark names to its material products, many of which have become more well-known and commonly used than the generic or chemical word for the material itself.
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History
DuPont participated from 1943 in the Manhattan project.
In 1999, Chad Holliday, CEO of DuPont, switched the company's focus towards growing DuPont chemicals in green plants instead of processing them from petroleum.
Currently
Today, DuPont is a global science company with 2004 revenues of approximately $28 billion, employs 55,000 people worldwide and is the 66th largest corporation in the United States. DuPont businesses are organized into the following five categories, known as marketing "platforms" - Electronic and Communication Technologies, Performance Materials, Coatings and Color Technologies, Safety and Protection, and Agriculture and Nutrition. In 2004 the company sold its textiles business to Koch Industries, losing some of its most well known brands such as Lycra (Spandex) and Thermolite.
Criticisms
In 1941, an investigation of Standard Oil Co. and IG Farben also brought new evidence concerning complex price and marketing agreements between DuPont, a major investor in and producer of leaded gasoline, U.S. Industrial Alcohol Co. and their subsidiary, Cuba Distilling Co. The investigation was eventually dropped, like dozens of others in many different kinds of industries, due to the need to enlist industry support in the war effort.
DuPont is an inventor of CFCs and the largest producer of ozone depleting chemicals in the world. DuPont sells $3 billion in CFCs worldwide. In 1987, Du Pont campaigned against effective controls on the use of CFCs. On April 27, 1992 Du Pont announced that "we will stop selling CFC's as soon as possible," but only in the "US and other developed countries." The chemical industry plans to replace CFCs with a new generation of chemicals, such as HCFCs and HFCs.
In June 1999, in West Virginia, the Tennant family sued DuPont for accidentally killing 280 Hereford cows with C-8, a proven animal carcinogen. DuPont was dumping the chemical in a landfill for nonhazardous waste. The chemical leaked into Dry Run Creek, where the cows drank it. The Tennants settled. As part of the settlement, the Tennants were forbidden to discuss the case. The local drinking water was also contaminated with the C-8. Up to 50,000 residents of the mid-Ohio Valley started a class-action lawsuit against DuPont. They claim that DuPont knew that C-8 was in the public water supply since 1984, but never informed the community. DuPont says the amount of C-8 is too low to raise health concerns, and that they met their reporting obligations.
The EPA is researching how C-8 has entered the bloodstream of much of the country’s population. Blood-bank samples from across the U.S. are being looked at. This investigation seeks to determine if DuPont violated federal law by not informing the EPA years ago.
On May 26, 2003, ammonium perfluorooctanoate or APFO (used to produce Teflon and similar products) was found in groundwater near a North Carolina DuPont plant. The chemical leaked from a cement cistern the company wasn't using.
Based on the revelations made by Smedley Butler in 1933, the DuPont corporation has also been implicated in the Business Plot, or The Plot Against FDR. This alleged failed coup attempt was said to be a conspiracy of moneyed interests intended to strip President Franklin D. Roosevelt of his political power as a reaction against the New Deal
Some conspiracy theorists surmise that cannabis sativa was made illegal because the fibres from the hemp plant, used for fabrics and ropes, were in strong competition with DuPont's nylon, a newly develloped fiber at the time. Since hemp cannot be used as a drug, but was made illegal along with cannabis sativa, it has been said that the inclusion of cannabis sativa into the same category of substances as heroin was made purposefully in order to destroy the hemp industry, therefore promoting nylon production.
Charles Higham's book on the subject of DuPont connections to Nazi Germany, "Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949," is highly recommended. Du Pont's anti-Semitism "matched that of Hitler" and, in 1933, the Du Ponts "began financing native fascist groups in America . . ." one of which Higham identifies as the American Liberty League: "a Nazi organization whipping up hatred of blacks and Jews," and the "love of Hitler". "Financed . . . to the tune of $500,000 the first year, the Liberty League had a lavish thirty-one-room office in New York, branches in twenty-six colleges, and fifteen subsidiary organizations nationwide that distributed fifty million copies of its Nazi pamphlets." "Between 1932 and 1939, bosses of General Motors [DuPont was a major shareholder] poured $30 million into I.G. Farben plants . . ." Further, Higham informs us that by "the mid-1930s, General Motors was committed to full-scale production of trucks, armored cars, and tanks in Nazi Germany."
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External links
Categories: Companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange | Section stubs | Chemical companies of the United States | Companies based in Delaware | DuPont | Fortune 500 companies
