Congress Looking at Bayer’s Continued and Baffling Use of Toxic Chemical
As if pesticides were not bad enough, Bayer, you still insist on using a highly toxic and dangerous chemical to produce those pesticides. No other pesticide manufacturer is stockpiling methyl isocyanate (MIC), so why do you continue to endanger the health of your employees and to a lesser extent your neighbors by finding that it necessary to house large quantities of methyl isocyanate.
A little history…Methyl Isocyanate is an ester of isocyanic acid, a volatile and poisonous substance made up of one Hydrogen, one Nitrogen, one Carbon and one oxygen atom. You’d think that those four elements would produce nothing but good, but then you’d be wrong. Methyl Isocyanate is used in making pesticides such as Bayer’s trademarked Sevin (carbaryl), among other pesticides used in industrialized agriculture.
Methyl isocyanate is not the only chemical that Bayer can use to produce carbaryl, but it is the cheapest. So you see, it’s not that Bayer has to use MIC, it’s that it is more profitable to use MIC. And we all know that profits come before human health and safety.
A plant making Sevin in India accidentally released MIC into the surrounding area of the then-Union Carbide Ltd plant outside of Bhopal back in 1984. The death toll from that accident is estimated to be around 16,000. One of the consequences of one of the worst industrial accidents ever was that Union Carbide and other chemical companies phased out MIC as a major ingredient in those yummy pesticide.
Everyone except Bayer, that is. And then, last year, an explosion at a Bayer CropScience plant in Institute, West Virginia narrowly avoided another disaster. The fire at the plant was a mere 80 feet from the above-ground MIC storage tank. At the time, Bayer assured the public that the MIC was in an underground storage tank far away from the fire.
But it seems that Bayer was lying. And because they lied, that meddling Committee on Energy and Commerce is looking into why Bayer still feels the need to keep so much MIC around. The Institute, WV plant is the only plant in the US that still has a substantial (more than 10,000 pounds) inventory of MIC.
Bayer is being asked (nicely) to give the CEC an explanation why it has so much MIC lying around, if Bayer has even begun to think about not using MIC, and what it would cost to switch to alternative chemicals. I hope that the cost estimate is not being included, so we taxpayers can cough up the dough to help a very rich company pay for being safe.
Bayer, pesticide, Bhopal, gas, MIC, methyl isocyanate, toxic substance, chemicals, agriculture, India, industrial accident, Congress
May 7th, 2009 at 3:45 am
Bayer have another nasty product recently
released onto the NZ market this product is called Oberon.Over one year since the original appplication this chemical is still causing severe deformities on orchid crops.Oberon is being used on many food crops worldwide with minimum withholding periods,I shudder to think.This story is only in it’s infacy and will soon be the subject of international discussions.