Michigan and New Jersey look exceptionally bad on that map. Disgusting!
3M has voluntarily acknowledged to regulators that its Decatur, Alabama, plant illegally released a perfluorinated chemical to the Tennessee River, which supplies drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people.
The only way to fix this, aside from activism, is, every elections, at any level from local to federal, to check out how much a candidate has taken from lobbyists for these companies, and check out what they think about regulation of the chemical industries. Stop voting for any politician, no matter what political party, who takes money from these corporations/corporate interests, or who talks about “the industry will regulate itself”, “regulations harms people because it reduces corporate bottom line”, or any other weaselly excuses. Especially support initiatives that ban products from out of the USA which are produced without the same regulations as required here, and ban corporations who produce them and sell them elsewhere from selling their products in the USA.
A. Pollutants do not respect political borders
B. Corporations should not benefit from avoiding regulations by going overseas, and
C. Corporations should not be able to blackmail communities by demanding less regulation “otherwise we’ll take our jobs overseas”.
In all honesty, I’m not a great believer in “competition will result in the best for everybody”. But if the majority want that competition, at least make sure that, A, the competition benefits costumers, and that B, corporations which do the right thing aren’t penalized for it.