DuPont vs Chemours facilities

On July 1, 2015 DuPont completed the spin-off of The Chemours Company. There have been many reports about how DuPont loaded Chemours up with a large proportion of both its environmental liabilities and its debt, raising the question of what would happen if Chemours went bankrupt. DuPont is also attempting to merge with Dow Chemical, and there are rumors that the merger, if approved, will be followed by a split of the merged companies into three pieces. If that does happen it will be anyone's guess about who if anyone will pay for past pollution, and how much expensive litigation it would take to even begin to answer that question.

The immediate question, and first step, is to track which DuPont components have become Chemours. Let's say that you have a database divided up into reporting by facility, as most environmental databases are. And let's also say that the data that you have show all facilities reporting as DuPont, because you are tracking past data or because the database you're using last reported before the split (as the 2014 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) did). Which U.S. DuPont facilities are now Chemours facilities?

Here's the best answer I could turn up to this question from public documents. The list of Chemours facilities is from a June 5, 2015 SEC filing. The number of facilities matches the number of production facilities in the U.S. from the Chemours Web site. Note (1) in the City column indicates a lease, (2) indicates a lease from Du Pont (which I've still treated as belonging to Chemours), and (3) indicates a shared facility between two branches of Chemours.

The facilities below are basically identified by city and state in most sources. But some of the facilities are actually in different cities than the city that they are referred to as being in, either in their mailing address or their facility name. The "2014 TRI" column shows which city the facility is actually in according to that database. If the city is the same as the first column (or if I didn't find it at all), I've marked it with an "x". Otherwise, it shows an alternate city that the facility may be listed under.

City	State	2014 TRI
El Dorado (1)	AR	x
Edge Moor	DE	x
Red Lion (1)	DE	Delaware City
Starke (Mine)	FL	x
Louisville	KY	x
Wurtland	KY	x
Burnside	LA	Darrow
Elkton (1)	MD	x
DeLisle	MS	Pass Christian
Pascagoula (3)	MS	x
Fayetteville	NC	x
Deepwater	NJ	x
Morses Mill (1)	NJ	Linden
Niagara	NY	x
Fort Hill	OH	North Bend
N. Kingstown (1)	RI	x
New Johnsonville	TN	x
Memphis	TN	x
Corpus Christi	TX	Gregory
LaPorte (2)	TX	x
Beaumont	TX	Nederland
Borderland (1)	TX	x
James River	VA	Richmond
Washington	WV	x
Belle (3)	WV	x

Environmental data reports

I mostly work on data-backed sites that present free information to the public. I've done it as a staffer for a nonprofit group from 1991-1997 and as a consultant to nonprofit groups since 1997. From 1998-2005 I also helped to analyze data for a number of white-paper reports from environmental groups -- after that, computer and data literacy became widespread enough so that this kind of work was generally done in-house. These reports are mostly of historical interest now, but some of them may still be useful. There's a page that lists them, but it's a bit much to look through so I've listed them by category here:

• PRTRs (pollutant release and transfer registries): 1991 (waste transfers), 1998 (underground injection), 1998 (water), 2000 (water), 2000 (child development), 2005 (regulatory), 2013 (water)
• chemical accidents: 1998, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007
• air toxics: 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004

In addition there were two reports that were pretty much sui generis and were in many ways my favorites: Poisoning Our Future (1998) and Cabinet Confidential (2004). The first of these looked at sources of persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs) by integrating many different documents and databases: something like I'd like some day to go back to and see what we were wrong and right about. The second was a rather inspired but rickety attempt to use a Massachusetts toxics use database, a New Jersey toxics use database, and the U.S. national PRTR to estimate quantities of toxic chemicals within products nationwide, something that none of these databases had been designed to do.

With this and the posts below (copied from my personal blog, when I had a brief enthusiasm for writing posts about this kind of thing in late 2008 / early 2009) I've summed up my previous writing about data. I'm working on a wider variety of projects now and hope to write about them here.