DuPont: Brandywine Gunpowder, Nylon, Freon and the C8 Teflon Lawsuits

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DuPont began in 1802 when French chemist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, fleeing the French Revolution, built a gunpowder mill on Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware, with imported French machinery. It supplied between a third and half of the Union Army's gunpowder in the Civil War, added dynamite and smokeless powder, and controlled nearly two-thirds of the U.S. explosives market until a 1912 Sherman Antitrust Act ruling spun off Hercules and Atlas Powder. The company then founded the DuPont Experimental Station, where chemist Wallace Carothers, hired in 1928, developed neoprene and in 1935 nylon. In World War II DuPont employed 37,000 workers, made 4.5 billion pounds of explosives, sent nylon to parachutes, and built and ran the Hanford plutonium site for the Manhattan Project, later building the Savannah River plant. Mylar, Lycra and Kevlar followed the war.

In 1930 DuPont and General Motors formed Kinetic Chemicals to make Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant, and by the 1980s DuPont was the largest CFC maker, with $600 million in annual sales. Despite a 1974 pledge to stop if CFCs proved harmful, in 1988 it called proposed regulations unwarranted, then, ten days after a March 1988 NASA study showed a 2.3 percent ozone decline, announced a phase-out and backed the Montreal Protocol. Teflon, invented in 1938, relied on PFOA, or C8. In 1999 lawyer Rob Bilott sued on behalf of a Parkersburg, West Virginia, cattle rancher, a case that grew into a class action over drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio, and internal documents showed DuPont scientists had known for decades of links to serious health effects. In 2015 DuPont spun off Chemours with liabilities for 171 sites, then merged with Dow and split into Corteva, Dow and a new DuPont.

• Before the U.S. entered World War II, company president Irénée du Pont was a financial supporter of Adolf Hitler; the Nazi government seized DuPont's German assets in 1943.
• DuPont won a 2003 National Medal of Technology for developing CFC replacements.
• A court-appointed C8 science panel found probable links to six conditions, including kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease and ulcerative colitis.
• Settlements included $671 million for over 3,000 Parkersburg claims in 2017, $1.2 billion over PFAS in drinking water, and $2 billion for New Jersey sites.
• A 2014 methyl mercaptan leak in Texas killed four workers, and DuPont pleaded guilty to criminal negligence.