A New Roll Call of of the Worst Corporate Polluters
When it comes to dealing with egregious corporate polluters, we tend to think first about what the EPA and the Justice Department are doing to address the problem. Yet there is another way in which environmental miscreants can be called to account: private litigation.
For the past half-century, a series of major lawsuits have served as the means by which large corporations have been compelled to change many of their worst environmental practices and compensate victims of those abuses.
Some of these cases have become legendary and have inspired Hollywood movies:
The 2000 film Erin Brockovich told the story of a legal clerk who was central to a successful lawsuit against the utility Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating the water supply of a California town with the cancer-causing hexavalent chromium
The 2019 movie Dark Waters dramatized the efforts of attorney Robert Bilott to get DuPont to take responsibility for exposing residents of a West Virginia community to highly toxic chemicals called PFOAs
https://www.dcreport.org/2021/09/30/a-new-roll-call-of-of-the-worst-corporate-polluters/