In the movie The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft has memorial lines and scenes which are often repeated. One of the lines is Mrs. Robinson are you trying to seduce me? the another line is Mr. Bancroft tells the Dustin Hoffman – the future is plastics. The plastics comes from the chemical industry world and in many ways the line was true. To use less weight, plastics were invented and are used in many manufacturing industries, that is the good part. The non so good part is for chemical companies what did they do with the wastes from plastics and other chemicals used in our present lives?

A book called Paradise Falls by Keith O’Brien published by Pantheon Books, New York, 2022 shows chemical companies often dumped the wastes into the waters around the planet or put the wastes in drums and buried them. Out of sight out of mind was an accepted solution. The problem was not right away but over the months and years, the drums or containers broke down and then whatever was in the barrel flowed the same way water flows underground. The difference when water flows underground it may cause flooding, but that be mopped up or protective measures around homes to prevent the flooding. When chemicals flow the way water does – the chemicals will eventually get into the body and caused multiple reactions and 99% plus are not good. Children and pregnant mother’s are affected first, then anyone with lower immune systems and eventually men and older women. The chemicals take time to develop in the body and often are diagnosis as something else because we all think we are living reasonably normal lives. Then within a few years multiple people within the area are having medical problems higher than normal or clusters and people investigate to the why?

In the book, the area that is focused on is Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York. If you ever been, the town was a working-class town because the companies that made products from chemicals and the biggest city nearby is Buffalo. To make chemicals relatively low cost energy or hydro electric power is needed, Niagara Falls has the falls for electricity. A working-class town tends to mean that people have income but not high savings which limits their ability to move or they accepted the employers not being environmentally correct and go about their regular working lives.

In this case, the company buried drums of chemicals in a partially build canal system, which years later was filled with dirt to stabilize the land, eventually a school and a neighborhood were developed on top of it. From the surface the area looked like a good neighborhood to raise a family. Under the surface, the chemicals leaked from the drums and flowed underground similar to water patterns. If your home was above the canal or one of the old stream beds, your health was going to be worse than a neighbor a few houses over.

In the book, most of the data was being organized and collected by women, the decision makers were men. In all worlds, there is a bias, women have to better data than men, otherwise men will ask for more studies done by what they feel are organizations will a long history of studying the problems. The issue in Niagara Falls what should governments do and who should pay? The easy answer and the reality of the answer was to move everyone to other neighborhoods and ensure no one uses the land, till it is cleaned up. The harder answer is time frames, the book starts in the mid 1970’s people are living in single family dwellings and children going to school, by 1983 the school was taken down and people had left both where the canal was and where the old streams flowed. Getting to the end was a very long process to both recognize the issue and to have decision makers allocate enough money to find solutions, both easy and hard. In Washington, the rise of Superfund Act to clean up environmental dumps rose from President Carter’s administration in 1980, because in many places in the US chemicals were buried, just most did not become subdivisions.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, some chemical companies are some of the long-term payers of dividends and without their products the world would be different. However, with their products, what happens to the waste is a good thing to know. Sometimes new industries can be formed to find solutions to the wastes, but usually they are not as profitable as the maker of the chemical because of the barrier to entry cost. As a dividend buyer your big interest is the profitability of the company and hope with all the engineering talent in the company solutions are possible.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.