The report states that Campbell's admitted to violating the Clean Water Act at least 5,400 times between April 2018 and December 2024, with the incidents occurring at the canning factory located in Napoleon, Ohio.
“Campbell’s admission that it committed these violations will speed this case toward a trial that will decide what steps the company must take to curb its pollution and how large a civil penalty should be imposed. That’s great news for the people who live along the Maumee River and Lake Erie, who want prompt action on reducing sources of the toxic algae in their local waters,” said John Rumpler, Clean Water Program Director for Environment Ohio. “We appreciate Campbell’s willingness to work cooperatively with us and the federal government to solve its compliance problems, rather than spending time and effort contesting clear-cut violations of the Clean Water Act.”
This is criminal, not civil. The board of directors and executive leadership should be held criminally liable.
polluting waters directly leads to suffering and death on a mass scale. It would not an exaggeration to compare it to a weapon of mass destruction.
the board of directors and executive leadership are, therefore, mass murderers and should be prosecuted as such.
the business should be dissolved and sold off. Major shareholders should be on the hook to repair all the damage done by the company.
Until we all start internalizing this way of thinking, nothing will ever change. Fines will not fix anything. The corporate shield is a lie. When your company kills people at this scale, your liability shielding is irrelevant.
You could never trust big soup in the first place. These are the people that advertise a can of soup loaded with meat and vegetables, but then the can has a quarter sized piece of sausage and like three wet stringy things that vaguely resemble a familiar vegetable. 95% water, 0% honesty
Not soup related... but I used to enjoy Classico pasta sauces.
They started doing shrinkflation making the bottles so small that it wasn't quite enough now for the size of meal I'd make, but when they were on sale I got some since the price was good.
The sauce seemed really watery compared to before.
I checked the ingredients. The top ingredient was water.
I found an old bottle I still had, the top ingredient was tomato paste.
And that’s just what they were willing to admit to. I can guarantee their lawyers did a cost analysis to see how much the regulators would care about the remainder. Basically “we did it 10k times, but if we admit to 5.4k they won’t bother with the rest.”
Basically “okay, you caught us. We’ll take our lumps without complaining, so you won’t dig any deeper.”
It'd be against their goal to maximize shareholders value to do anything but this unless there's a smoking gun very obvious proof otherwise on the quantity.
And doing some more math at it, there are 1762 weekdays between those dates. Regulators probably rounded up to 1800 to account for the occasional weekend operation. Then the math comes out to three dumps per day, one for each work shift.
Regulators most likely found evidence of regular dumping, and then did the math backwards to the statue of limitations.
This is one of the most flagrant and reprehensible environmental crimes in quite awhile. What will come of it? And because it's not in my state, there's not much I can do to make it worse for them. I expect a small fine and business as usual.
"Our commitments to trusted food, vibrant communities, thriving people, and a healthy environment are among the ways we deliver on the promise of our purpose: Connecting people through food they love."
Every goddamned business in the world will fuck over the world for their "money". Fuck capitalism. That shit needs to stop right now. We need to make billionaires and trillionaires meaningless. I'm tired of the "opportunities" for earning money, such as the unemployed fire fighter who gets his job back after starting a bunch of wildfires. Let's base the economy on ecology, not on a fake value added to a paper thing.
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