Original subtitles

[dog yipping]

[man 1] Southeast wind.

[camera snaps]

-[man 1] You watch for the gator. -[man 2] Yeah, I'll watch.

[camera clicking]

[man 1] I'm gonna use my hand.

They're all in here.

Right here.

These aren't rocks.

They're pellets.

[man 3] It was a job.

Good money.

It's all about money.

Benefits.

When you're bringing home $80,000, $90,000 a year,

driving a new car, kids are in school...

Hey man, life is good.

[man 4] They didn't make any bones about telling you that there's...

200 people waiting in line for your job.

I skirted around it and tried to...

keep myself out of it.

But then you get to a point to where enough is enough,

and you gotta do something or...

you don't sleep at night.

[man 3] People kept telling me, "Leave it alone, leave it alone."

But, uh...

conscience got the best of me.

["Lie, Cheat, Steal" by Run the Jewels plays]

♪ Lie, cheat, steal, kill, win, win ♪

♪ Everybody doin' it ♪

♪ Lie, cheat, steal, kill, win ♪

♪ Everybody doin' it ♪

♪ Lie, cheat, steal, kill, win ♪

[woman speaking Chinese] My children...

although wealth is something everyone loves to have,

nobody is born with it,

nor can it be taken with them when they leave this earth.

My conviction has grown

that the greatest meaning and value in life

lies in giving your all to contribute

to the beauty and betterment of society.

I hope that all of my sons and daughters

can fully understand the true meaning of life...

to leave my wealth for all of society.

I hope the company I've founded in this lifetime

will be managed with sustainability in mind,

and be a blessing for employees and society in the long run.

[woman] Formosa first arrived in the US in the 1980s,

and set up a small PVC plant in Calhoun County,

in a small community called Point Comfort.

Quite quickly after it arrived,

the company developed somewhat of a reputation,

being a frequent violator of environmental rules.

It got slapped with a whole bunch of penalties early on.

A number of allegations against it around poor worker safety conditions...

releases of gas and chemicals into the waterways.

It had similar issues around its environmental record in Taiwan.

And so we could say that it had problems abroad.

But you've really got to look at Formosa

through the lens of Texas and Texas politics.

[man] We needed jobs...

desperately.

Formosa, at the time,

was a 100 million dollar plant,

And they were talking in terms of a-billion-400-million...

dollar plant.

There would be approximately 1,500 jobs,

And the jobs were paying about $70,000, $75,000 a year.

That was in 1988.

You know, 30 years ago,

that was very important to... to the community.

[man 2] They're talking about billions of dollars of investment

in the state of Texas.

It got the eye of the Texas Water Commission,

the governor of Texas.

When Chairman Wang came over here,

he talked to the state of Texas, the Regulatory Commission.

He talked to vendors.

So Chairman Wang was really-- He's uneducated. Uneducated.

Was a brilliant man.

[Wyatt] If you're from Taiwan, you probably hold him on a pedestal.

You know, it--

I am told that the Chairman, when he goes to Taiwan,

if he wants to speak with the president of the country...

gets in his car and calls him on the phone and said,

"Gee whiz, I'd like to come visit with you."

He was an individual with a great deal of power behind him.

In terms of coming to Texas and should he do that...

it would have meant a whole lot to us.

I had been in the Middle East,

I had been to Europe, been to Ireland, but I had never been to Taiwan.

We met with a table that was fully 20 feet long.

We made our presentation as to what Texas would provide.

We offered $30 million to build and improve

the port of Port Lavaca, Point Comfort.

We provided for a railroad...

plus tax abatement.

You had a lot of tax abatement in Texas.

The chairman listened very politely. Uh...

After that, he didn't say anything more.

I believed that, quite frankly,

that they were in favor of Formosa going to Louisiana.

We came back the next morning,

and the chairman indicated that he was coming to Texas.

Interestingly enough,

his first words to me...

in English...

was, "Joe, I will see you in November."

The governor was there, the senator was there.

It was very meaningful for Calhoun County.

[man] It was just constant, steady work.

Unloading steel, pouring concrete, building forms.

They told us that, since we worked construction

and helped build the plant,

we got...

hired on.

[man 2] The Formosa plant in Point Comfort

doesn't make plastic like the plastic bags.

They make the resin and stuff that they sell to other companies

that make plastic and pipe and stuff like that.

[man] We made powder.

Polyvinyl chloride.

To make it easy, it's like mixing a cake.

We had a hot mix man that mixed up all the chemicals.

[Rozner] We start with something like ethylene dichloride.

And then you would process that to something else,

say, like, to vinyl chloride.

And you would use vinyl chloride to make, say, the PVC resin.

[woman speaking Chinese]

These powder-small particles are the raw materials.

[speaking Chinese] And after making fiber, they can use it to make other things.

For example, carpets, diapers.

[woman speaking Chinese] All the diapers in the world could originate from this.

[speaking Chinese] Oh yes, that's possible. Also the carpet in your home.

[man] Fresh as they come.

They're all plastic.

[man 2] And they're all over the bay. We find them everywhere.

Every spot that we go to,

we make a detailed list of what we're finding,

where we are, and all types of relevant information.

[man 1] On the north side of this creek,

that's Formosa's outfalls.

But everything is owned.

See Formosa Plastics coming by to check on us?

[Hamrick] The north side.

They were taking pictures of us, what, the other day,

I think, when Diane was out here.

Yes, taking pictures.

[Hamrick] Well, we're going to take them, too.

[horn honks]

[horn honking]

[Rozner] This is kind of my sanctuary right here.

This is my bread and butter.

[cows moo]

[Rozner] In 2000, when I went to work for Formosa,

this is not where I thought that I would end up at.

I had a lot of high expectations, going into the job.

I got outstanding employee of the quarter,

and I was promoted to production supervisor.

But everything that we learned and all the studying and all the...

calculations and all the scratch paper and everything that we went through...

really didn't mean anything.

We weren't following air permit rules. We weren't following...

toxic substance control acts.

We weren't following clean water acts.

They made it clear that environmental restraints, safety restraints,

were not going to get in the way of production.

[Jurasek] They called me, basically, the lead operator.

When something happened, I'd be the first one to come help

and take-- take care of the situation at hand.

You worry about these chemicals...

because you know that they cause cancer.

Because I've seen fellow employees

throwing up just from getting hit with gas.

Something that you learn to live by as an operator

is, you know, you just go in there and you do what you got to do

and keep your mouth shut about it.

And when you start breaking laws, you start to wonder

what's right and what's wrong.

According to EPA,

you had to sample each stream of water that came in

for 24 hours.

And at eight o'clock that morning, we have to take these samples to the lab,

because all of this was critiqued by the Texas Water Commission.

Morning, we go in there, we open up the door,

a five-gallon bottle

would be one-quarter sludge.

Supervision knew this had to be reported.

And they knew that the operators were gonna take it as it was.

And so, they would stop us...

tell us, "Dump it out and refill it with good water."

And I looked at him, I said, "No."

I said, "I'm not going to do that for you."

I said, "I'm sorry. I'm not going to do it."

I said, "This is against the law."

And I said, "I'm not going to jail for Formosa, period."

And so, he grabs it from me and he does it.

Takes the stuff that was in the jar, the bad stuff, and just... [spits]

dumps it on the concrete.

And says, "All right, take it to the lab now."

What do you do? Retaliate? You can't retaliate.

You lose your job right there.

I've seen chemicals being washed down

straight to the storm sewer and being shot to the bay.

That was just some of the things you come across.

[Hamrick] I'll tell you what, when I first started, I loved my job.

And as it went on, it just got worse and worse...

because things would happen.

You'd lie.

Say, if I fill out the incident report,

I don't fill out the amounts.

They want you to put down what they tell you to put down,

and that's what you do.

They don't want to spend the money.

If they don't have to spend it, they're not going to spend it.

[woman] In 2013, Formosa was getting their permit renewed.

The permit says

you may not discharge more than a trace amount of pellets.

[woman 2] These were the ones that we entered into-- as actual exhibits.

Look.

Look!

What "trace amount" means is... it's so little, it's hard to see.

[Hamrick] This stuff is in the water, you know?

Your fish are going to take it in.

Then you got the children that's playing, that's in the water.

When I met one of the engineers,

I said, "You're fixing to get a lawsuit,

a federal lawsuit, filed against you."

Well, I told him that.

He just-- he took it as a joke.

See, Formosa didn't think this would happen.

I've been an environmental lawyer for a lot of years,

and I've never had a case like this.

It's citizen-collected evidence.

Probably the biggest example

of citizen-gathered evidence to prosecute a Clean Water Act case.

And I can tell you, lots and lots of years,

people...

who worked for the company were telling the company

that they have all kinds of problems.

[indistinct conversation]

[Johnson] These ex-employees are not a bunch of environmentalists

in a traditional sense of the word.

You know, they're not members of Sierra Club.

They are doing this out of a sense of concern

for their community, and...

it's just people who think you should follow the law.

[woman] FPG today employs over 110,000 people.

The group is capitalized at 21 billion US dollars,

owns nearly 103 billion U.S. dollars in assets,

and, in 2015, achieved revenues of over 60 billion.

Production operations girdle the globe,

with major plants in Taiwan, the USA, China,

Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

[Wang speaking Chinese] There is no pollution to speak of.

I'll say it one more time. You say serious pollution...

It's laughable. It really is laughable.

There simply won't be any pollution.

[man] When you look at the story of plastics and plastic pollution,

I think Formosa is emblematic of how little of that story

most people really understand.

Most people, when they think about plastics,

if they think about it at all,

they think about it as something that magically shows up

in an Amazon box or on the store shelf,

and then it disappears just as quickly.

Maybe you recycle it, maybe you don't,

but the plastic is there and gone before you think about it.

And what Formosa demonstrates

is that story of plastic is much bigger,

and, I think, more challenging than most people recognize.

[man] The picture you are about to see is the story of a dynamic part

of a remarkable new industry.

[audience applauding]

♪ Tupperware ♪

♪ Tupperware ♪

♪ They came from everywhere ♪

♪ Orlando to Delaware to buy it ♪

[man] Developed as an insulating material, it had unheard of qualities.

It was unbreakable,

odorless, tasteless.

[Muffett] The real excitement for plastics came from the fact

that plastics are, above all else,

cheap.

[man] New low-cost furniture...

[Muffett] It's not driven by a demand for more plastics here in the US,

but it's driven by a massive supply of cheap gas

that can be used to produce more plastics,

no matter what the true consequences of that are.

Ninety-nine percent of what goes into plastics are fossil fuels.

Oil, gas and coal.

And so, the human health and the environmental impacts of plastic,

they begin not on the store shelf, but at the wellhead and the drill pad,

with the release of toxic contaminants into people's air and into people's water.

And then those impacts

follow the pipelines down to the refineries,

to the facilities like Formosa,

where they produce the chemical reactions that will create the plastics.

And then the plastics enter our kitchen and leak micro-plastic debris

all over our kitchen counters,

and find their way into our mouths and our bodies.

After plastics leave our houses,

they go to be disposed of through incinerators

that themselves release a host

of really highly toxic compounds into surrounding communities.

Plastics have been found in drinking water supplies

around the world.

More than 690 species,

including important food species in the marine ecosystems,

have been found to have plastics throughout their guts and their bodies.

They've been found in agricultural soils,

which increases the risk that the toxins that travel with the plastics

could enter the food we eat through the ground.

And plastics have been detected in human bodies,

over and over again, in countries around the world.

This means that we are not only living in a plastic planet,

but we are, ourselves, increasingly becoming plastic.

[grunts]

Oh, there. Let me see.

Make sure I'm in park.

Maybe if I had a--

[tape ripping]

[grunts]

[muffled] Ah-ha!

The guys tell me this is the way they fix leaks at Formosa.

Duct tape.

Believe it or not,

Port Lavaca, the community we're going through right now,

in 1930 was the number one port

in the entire United States

for, uh, shipping out shrimp.

And it's-- now there are no fish houses.

I never, in my life,

thought I would see the end of the fishing industry.

And this is Lavaca Bay up here.

People take their kids swimming, wading out there.

And then you go out there and you'll see all of this powder,

you know, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride,

rolling in with the waves.

But all of that is Formosa, all of that out there is Formosa.

My family has been here 120 years,

so you have a real sense of place.

I was a fisherwoman.

That is my identity.

I was, uh, my own boat captain before I was 21,

and ran my own boat.

But when I was a kid,

everything, the family,

was the bay, and the fish house, and the boats.

And when a season started, it was like a-- it was like a celebration.

Dragging the nets and dragging the gear, and...

I remember when I was very, very young,

I literally-- and this is true,

I literally could see the water.

I could see her and she was a person.

She was... she was an old woman,

and she had the feeling of a grandmother,

and I could go to that bay, and it's like, there she was.

And I have never forgotten that.

So, for me, when they go after the bay,

it's like they go after

a living being that is kin to me,

and I'm like, "You can get many things,

you can get many prizes and honors, but they are not getting the bay."

Hello.

Diane.

Hi, I'm Diane Wilson. Nice to meet you.

[Wilson] Hi. How're you doing? How you doing?

[man speaking Chinese] This is Diane Wilson.

[man speaking Vietnamese] Over the past five years,

she has been the lead representative of the group who sued the Formosa company.

She has collected more than 2,400 samples from the water.

[Wilson] All right, we're going to do the press conference

on the other side, and it's by Formosa's facility.

Diane has been fighting with this company for years.

[O'Regan] Diane's been at it for 30-plus years now.

She has become the leader of this informal group.

They really rely on Diane as a support,

and I'm sure that she relies on them too.

[Wilson] Very early, the workers started reaching out to me.

They started giving me information.

[man] The equipment, the cheapest, most outdated or even discontinued...

[Wilson] I got to know them very well.

[man] Leaks and spills everywhere of highly corrosive material.

Regular night dumps and burns...

[Wilson] Saw their documentation, saw their photographs,

saw their injuries, saw their trauma.

[man] ...experiencing unbearable pains throughout my whole body.

My pain is in my bones.

[Wilson] I started hearing from the workers about all the powder.

They said it's got vinyl chloride,

it causes liver cancer,

and it's out there in the bay.

[man] You get that kids swim out here? Jet skis and everything else.

[Johnson] In environmental cases,

there's something called the "economic benefit."

You look at what should they have done.

They should have designed their storm water system differently.

They should have put something on their wastewater treatment plant

before it came to the plant, not at the end of the pipe.

They should have done some more source control,

some other things like that,

and they should have done it in 2000

when Dale Jurasek told them, "You got problems."

So you look at how much would it have cost them

if they had followed the law.

It's 43 million dollars.

[Wilson] It is the workers

who gave me a window

into the soul of that company over there.

[man] "Cut the cost, make it cheaper," is the FPC mentality.

[Rozner] In April 22nd, 2014,

we had a fatality at...

at the SPVC unit.

There was a young man that was working on the tank,

and he fell inside the tank.

He was in there for, uh, quite...

a while before he was, uh... found.

The young man was doing what he was told to do

by upper management at Formosa.

And there were safety issues that were not being followed.

Uh, they did know that.

And that was the turning point where I said, "Enough is enough,"

and I slowly increased

my concerns, my reports to management.

I told my manager that I was going to contact the EPA

and I was going to inform them of what was being done.

That I had had enough and that...

I didn't want it on my conscience of somebody else losing their life.

And the next day, I was terminated.

It was...

"conduct unbecoming a Formosa employee"...

believe it or not.

[Johnson] There's fear.

There's fear that people are going to get retaliated against.

I mean, I had to talk to quite a few people who wouldn't testify

because they were afraid

of what would happen to them or their relatives.

But Van is a brave soul,

because when he was a supervisor there, he took pictures.

And he saved them, and he wasn't supposed to do that.

But we're going to, tomorrow, in opening statement, show these pictures

where it looks like a snowstorm and it's...

SPVC powder all over the place.

And we have those because Van was brave enough to do that.

The whistleblowers around Formosa

have popped up at various times in its history.

Some of them are talking about a different time, some decades ago.

Some of them, like Van, are speaking about recent events.

So you're dealing with a lot of different pockets of time.

So many years have gone by,

there's such a sprawling history to this whole story.

[woman] There was, you know what, 20 years ago,

a lady and some mothers who lived in Point Comfort,

called me and asked me to represent them,

because there were so many explosions and upsets and incidences,

some of which the children would have to be sheltered in place

-in the elementary school... -[sirens wail]

...and the roads would be blocked,

so the parents couldn't get back to their children.

[sirens continue wailing]

And they became scared to live there and they had to move away.

I started getting calls from other people

who were injured at the plant or who had issues with Formosa.

And so then suddenly, I was representing 87 people here.

This is a list of the Clean Air Act violations

beginning in '93, but there's some in '94.

The company is supposed to give the government a conservative model

to say, "Look, these are the chemicals we're going to use,

this is what we are emitting into the air,

and we're going to tell you the most it could ever be."

We actually hired someone

who used to do air modeling for the government

to do an air dispersion model at Point Comfort.

And it showed a much higher level of pollution

than what Formosa had represented to get their permit.

What I basically did with the property owners in Point Comfort,

and even the people that have been hurt,

is I can move them away from harm's way,

but I can't change the fact that their community was altered.

And these people had planned to live in Point Comfort for generations.

Money doesn't solve that.

[speaking Chinese] I've never shown you all this before.

So now I want to introduce this Japanese factory.

This is called...

This is a petrochemical plant.

As you can see in the picture, it is just like a public park.

Exactly like a park.

[Wilson] Formosa was trying to build

this huge expansion in Taiwan.

[speaking Chinese] I have previously said that, of everyone in Yilan County,

perhaps those I care about most are the fishermen in Su'ao.

[Wilson] He had screwed it up so royally

that the villagers had literally thrown rocks

when he came down to talk.

But they were pretty sure that people in Texas would, uh...

be quiet and just stay out of it.

[speaking Chinese] They've sacrificed our people's health

for their own profit and benefit.

It really is a company with no ethics of conscience.

I hope they can find some morality and stop making this dirty money.

[speaking Chinese] ...remove mercury waste. No to pollution.

Survival.

[man speaking Chinese] The government and FPC covered many things up.

They seriously exceeded safety limits.

Nobody here in Renwu village knew. We were all kept in the dark.

This should be punished by law.

[man 2 speaking Chinese] Come out, you filthy liars.

[demonstrator yelling]

[man 2] All the ponds are polluted.

All the prawns and clams are dying.

[man 3] It's upsetting. When I come here, I just want to cry. Each one is the same.

-[whistle blowing] -[air horn blaring]

[man 2] We told them to improve.

We've said that for 30 years. When's it going to happen?

It started with mercury waste. Time after time they are poisoning us.

How have the people nearby benefited? There's been no benefit.

They've given me cancer, that's all.

[man speaking Chinese] YC Wang...

Your 5,000 tons of mercury waste...

dumped onto our home in Xinyuan for two years...

we're only asking you to have this for just two hours.

-[clamoring] -[whistles blowing]

Fellow countrymen.

You are breaking the law.

[clamoring continues]

[whistles blowing]

[Wyatt] Quite frankly,

I have never been assured that, uh--

convinced, at least,

that Formosa was a bad corporate citizen.

Uh, I mean, I think that they tried to play by the rules.

[Ford] Formosa's getting sued all the time. They're used to it.

They got a big staff of people and they got,

not just me, but other consultants that work with them on litigation.

A lot of plaintiffs don't like big industry,

so they just like to sue Formosa.

It's almost a... it's almost a habit to sue Formosa.

[Wyatt] There were all kinds of rumors out there that, that, you know,

we'd buried drums, that we'd done all this sort of stuff.

You know, where are they?

I was fairly close to Formosa at the time,

and, you know, it just...

What was happening was not what we were hearing.

And if you were there, you simply knew

that-- that it wasn't happening.

Always told my staff and--

when I was in Washington, when I was in Austin...

Uh...

"Tell me the truth. I'll do the lying."

[chuckles]

Um...

That's what I meant at the time.

I mean, tell me the truth.

I mean, I've got to know the facts.

Uh, I'll lie, but...

you know, it may take a while.

[O'Regan] It's a very different environment in Texas.

A lot of politicians are favorable toward these big companies.

There's been relationships between Formosa and politicians,

and various governors over the years.

It's donated a lot of money to different parts of the community.

School board, the police.

And executives at Formosa have donated money over the years

to various political campaigns. And in fact, in 1990,

the EPA announced that Formosa was facing a huge fine

for environmental violations.

It was 8.3 million dollars.

Shortly after this was announced,

four executives at Formosa

donated $1,000 each to the Phil Gramm campaign,

which was the legal limit at the time.

And shortly after that

the EPA fine was reduced significantly to a little over three million.

[man] After working 12 years

for the Texas commission on Environmental Quality,

I realized that the agency seem to be more interested

in protecting polluters than public health.

They say that they're there to protect

the right to clean air that people have in Texas,

but it's a lie.

Formosa is one of the biggest, dirtiest chemical plants in the state of Texas.

And I became deeply concerned because I knew that Formosa Plastics

was handling extremely toxic substances,

such as known human carcinogens like vinyl chloride.

The agency would give out tens of thousands of permits

that said, you know, "Thou shalt not pollute so much

to make people sick or give them cancer,"

but the agency didn't really enforce it.

We only did some monitoring or sampling if people complained.

And before the agency sends a mobile laboratory out to Point Comfort,

they will call the plant and say,

"Within one to two days, we're going to have

our mobile laboratory down there, sampling the air on your plants."

Every time TCEQ was coming in, we knew about it.

We were told by management and vice presidents and stuff

that TCEQ was going to be here and we would go out and move...

We would clean up and make everything all pretty and...

then we would provide them with the information that was...

selective of what we wanted them to look at to begin with.

[Carman] They would drive up to Point Comfort

and do their investigations,

and they'd write some violations,

but a lot of those violations would only result

in kind of a "slap on the wrist"-type fines.

The agency certainly wouldn't revoke any of the permits.

That's unthinkable.

[man] The truth of the matter is, the state of Texas

takes very little punitive action

against those people that commit a crime against the environment.

Look at the fines

that Formosa has paid. They're de minimis.

And the public suffers as a result of it.

[Jurasek] They had vinyl chloride monomer,

VCM readings at the school.

And it was over the threshold limit.

And these children were there for eight hours.

And, well, they shut down the school eventually.

Formosa bought the school.

They own Point Comfort.

[woman] When I was a young pediatrician,

often, children would come in over and over,

over the course of many months with the same disease,

and we never talked about the effects of the environment on child health.

When I finally realized that so many of the pneumonias

and so many of the middle ear infections

and so many of the respiratory infections that kids had

were linked to contaminated environments, then the light went on.

We have 85,000 chemicals in commerce and...

we only know a tiny bit

about their effects on the developing human being.

These days, babies are being born pre-polluted,

with the same chemicals that were circulating in the womb,

in his blood system.

Many moms and dads assume that

something would never be approved

if it was unsafe for the developing infant,

but in fact, the EPA and the FDA often simply don't know.

When we think about regulation,

a lot of us think about the kind of regulation

that the FDA does for drugs.

They go through a laborious system

where the drug has to undergo clinical trials

in human beings at a variety of doses,

and it's only after these trials have been completed

that the FDA will go ahead and say, "Yes, this can be marketed

for use among people in the United States."

Nothing like this occurs for chemicals.

Chemicals don't have to go through

any kind of clinical trial to see their effect on humans

before they're launched into the marketplace.

[man] Many infectious diseases can be brought completely under control

when vaccination against them...

[Etzel] Almost all of our acute, infectious diseases of childhood

have been eradicated due to wonderful immunization programs.

What we see now is epidemics of chronic disease.

Unusually large numbers of children suffering with asthma.

Epidemic numbers of children

with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,

unusually large numbers of children with autism spectrum disorder,

and these are what are called "the new diseases of childhood."

And there's more and more evidence that these chronic diseases

have been associated

with the chemicals that we are pouring into our environment.

[Jurasek] When I realized...

that I was putting citizens...

of the county in jeopardy,

and our children in jeopardy...

that's when everything changed.

I wanted to know what kind of chemical was being shot to the bay.

And I read the MSDS on it.

And I'd seen that it cause, uh,

deformations in children,

plus cancer and all this other stuff.

It said that it would affect...

the next generation down...

of children.

That really shook me up.

And it's just-- it's something that eats you up after a while.

I told EPA what was going on.

Two days later, the FBI

and EPA was knocking on my door.

I invited them in,

I told them everything I knew.

They wanted me to go in with a pager,

and I made up this story

because we weren't allowed cell phones or anything like that.

Well, actually, this pager was a recorder.

So, next thing I knew, I was feeding information to them.

You know, that was...

a bad feeling.

Having to...

manipulate your friends, say things

that they know about or did.

You know, and then having to report it to the EPA,

that's what bothered me the most.

But I wanted it to come to an end.

You know, I wanted management to be ran right,

not have to worry about chemicals hurting people

or anything like that.

These people need to be dealt with, and dealt with severe.

Show them what happens...

when you want to go ahead-- screw up everybody's life in this world.

You walk into a gun and rob a place,

they put your ass in jail.

These men are dumping chemicals into the bay and killing people.

What's the difference?

They have no right.

None whatsoever.

Especially when you're talking children.

You don't ever fuck with children.

That's the rule.

And I'll leave it at that.

[man] My big concern about plastics

is that, even if you manufacture them

exactly as you're supposed to,

and you control the air pollution,

the criteria used to assess safety today

are so deeply flawed,

no one can say they're doing it right,

even if they live up to EPA and FDA standards,

because those standards are based on flawed assumptions.

When we go into the store and we pull a product off the shelf,

and you look at the polysyllabic chemicals that are listed,

the vast majority of those chemicals have never been tested

by safety officials.

And if they have them tested, they've been tested

using old protocols based upon a sixteenth-century assumption.

The higher the dose, the bigger the effect.

But hormones and endocrine-disrupting compounds

don't work like that.

They do things at really low levels,

levels that toxicologists had never thought were relevant.

On the FDA's pharmaceutical side,

some of their drugs behave like hormones.

There's one in particular called tamoxifen.

It's used to treat breast cancer.

It works at high doses because it shuts down tumor growth.

At doses a thousandfold beneath that, it turns up tumor growth.

So the FDA on the drug side understands this.

On the chemical side, it's a no-no.

[man] It's a chemical found in many plastic products

like water bottles and baby bottles.

[Myers] Think of the most notorious: Bisphenol A, BPA.

If you use the data that the FDA has today

to calculate what a safe dose is,

that safe dose would have to be reduced by a factor of 20,000.

BPA would no longer be usable in the marketplace.

That chemical is worth $750,000 an hour of revenue,

but it's one of only at least a thousand other endocrine-disrupting compounds

whose safety dose would have to be lowered also.

[Etzel] There are a large number of vested interests

who profit from the chemicals in our environment

and I believe these vested interests

have a louder and louder voice in this administration.

[man] A panel of experts says it found no overriding health concerns

for the general population

associated with bisphenol A.

Those levels are very low,

well below any level that could cause harm.

[Muffett] Groups like the American Chemistry Council,

the Society for the Plastics Industry,

these companies share information and coordinate PR campaigns.

[woman] ...not show a connection...

...on the regulation of their products, on public awareness of their products.

[man] Making a difference here at home...

The American Chemistry Council is responsible for this advertisement.

[man 2] The American Chemistry Council is responsible for the content...

We, the scientists at EPA,

are, primarily,

barred from the conversations that occur

between the chemical industry and the top administrators of EPA.

And my job at the Office of Children's Health Protection

was to ensure that EPA

took steps to ensure

that children were protected from chemicals.

And...

because I was asking EPA to take into account

the special vulnerability of children,

they decided that they...

would put me on administrative leave.

And...

that way they could...

dismiss the views of an inconvenient pediatrician.

I worked very hard

and I see what I consider to be an injustice,

and I see that, no matter what I did,

it didn't change much.

I mean...

I won the case.

You know, I won the cases I took on.

As from a legal perspective,

I worked within the system

to hopefully make a difference for my clients.

But what...

doesn't change is that the polluter keeps polluting...

and it's just new people in place.

No plant,

and I don't care where it's located

or who owns it, whether it's...

Exxon's plant, or Formosa's plant, or whoever,

they're not going to do these things unless

they had at least the tacit approval

of upper management.

I take great comfort in knowing that there's going to come a time...

when that corporate boss in New York in his oak-paneled room...

office, is gonna be-- is gonna suffer the same consequence.

That time will come.

When they lose their children to...

to asthmatic attacks or lung cancer,

then you'll see some change.

[birds twittering]

[Jurasek] Towards the end of my job, roughly for about a year, two years,

couldn't figure out why I was sick so much.

Aching all over,

and then I started getting sores

on my neck that looked like boils.

I went to the doctors.

Nobody knew what it was in Port Lavaca.

I went to the next county.

Nobody knew what it was.

In Tyler, Texas, they had a OSHA medical department there.

I continued seeing that doctor for months,

and then one day a lady walked up to me and she said,

"Do you know this chemical? Do you know this chemical?

You know this one, this one, this one?" I said, "Yeah."

I said, "I work with every one of them."

She said, "Well, that's what you got in you."

She said, "That's why you have the problems you've got."

It did non-repairable damage to the nerve system.

These chemicals are causing damage to people.

Things ain't being done right.

That's one reason why I got the feds involved

and EPA involved.

And then that turned out being a flop after three years of investigating.

I thought that the fact that the FBI investigated this case for three years

and built up a whole investigation into Formosa,

and then didn't prosecute,

was really fascinating.

And it seemed, from what we found,

that there was a loss of momentum around pursuing it further,

because there had been another case against Koch Industries

quite similar, with a whistleblower, at that time.

And I think it had sucked up a lot of time and resources

that hadn't generated a huge penalty.

And so, Formosa fell by the wayside.

But you're talking about companies with so much money,

that the bigger question is: what is a significant penalty?

What kind of penalty would make change or have any impact?

[Wilson] I tend to believe

the impossible.

I have a real hope

that the judge will do something unprecedented,

and set a line

that the rest of the industry is going to have to follow.

The best story would be to have that feeling of being heard,

vindication for the people who testified at the trial,

because there've been lots of people in the community who've...

been hard on them.

[Jurasek] But let me tell you something, life as a whistleblower...

It's not a pretty thing.

These families see you as the bad guy,

not the guy that was trying to help.

Formosa employs so many people.

And when I speak up

and I threaten Formosa,

then they could possibly lose their job.

And that takes away their bread and butter.

So shut the guy up, don't let him talk no more.

Me having threats,

lug nuts loose and...

shots towards the house.

I had four guys beat the shit out of me on the river one day.

Four of them on one.

Yeah.

And that's why I still, to this day,

I will fear retaliation,

and I will always watch my back.

I had a .45 in the backside of my britches

and a sawed-off shotgun in my hand.

My children,

I've seen them not hired

because they knew that their daddy was a whistleblower.

Just gets really depressed talking about it.

It's only because of what they did to him.

Everything that's gone through Dad, it's--

I have to deal with it in some way.

[Jurasek] That's when you question yourself.

"Did I do the right thing?"

Do you know that that day I drove out of that plant,

I looked up at my window and I thought,

"This is it, ain't it?"

I said, "This is why you've put me on this earth.

And that is to protect our children's children."

And I did what I needed to be done.

[man] A billion-dollar expansion project is underway

nearby at Formosa Plastics.

Fisherman and other environmental groups are concerned.

[woman] This company is going to destroy that entire ecosystem...

[Wilson] I got a long history of tracking Formosa.

They're not going to give their power up easily.

But the first time, I think,

I think we can make some change. I really do.

We were texting and calling and it felt great.

Yeah, it was pretty exciting.

[woman] A US district judge says Formosa was a serial violator

of the Clean Water Act and had been dumping plastic pellets

into Lavaca Bay, another nearby...

[Johnson] It's $53,000 a violation.

On any day, we can have three violations,

in the bay, a violation in the creek, and a violation for a failure to report,

so $165,000 a day.

If he gave us the maximum fines, it could be $162 million dollars.

It's a small penalty in comparison to their profits,

but it is something they will not be happy with

and something they will pay attention to.

[Wilson] What I've been doing...

it has, materialistically,

taken everything.

It's taken the boat, it's taken the job.

It took my house. It took my marriage.

A lot of people are afraid.

And it's like...

that's when you know...

[chuckles] you're on the right path, is when you're afraid.

if you're not afraid, then you're doing something

mighty comfortable and mighty safe.

And it's when you start being afraid,

you know you're probably walking your path.

I believe...

everybody...

has a destiny.

I believe everybody

has a meaning, and it's your choice

whether you go there.

I think every person, at some point in their life,

they're going to get a little piece of information

or a little clue for just...

a very short time, and it's like, "Do I do this or I don't?"

And it's...

And it's freedom. I have-- I have...

never liked myself so well, and I've never felt so free.

And I guarantee you, if a fisherwoman

in a dead town like Seadrift...

I mean, it's out there for all of us.