Pollution from the world’s largest drug companies is contributing to the terrible air quality that's killing 4,400 people every single day in China -- but Pfizer won’t tell us how much toxic carbon it’s spewing into the atmosphere.
This is how corporations disguise the pollution they pump into our air and water: they outsource drug production to contractors in China, where they can avoid taking responsibility for the carbon emissions created by manufacturing their products. And drug companies do double damage because much of their wastewater contains antibiotics, creating superbugs that develop immunity to conventional drugs.
This cocktail of supply-chain problems is leading us toward a nightmare scenario where climate change fatalities are out of control and the effectiveness of our medicine is plummeting. But we can’t even hold Pfizer to account because it refuses to come clean over how much pollution it spews out through its supply chain.
Tell Pfizer it can’t hide its deadly pollution any longer. Demand it discloses its supply-chain footprint now.
Corporations have become better and better at presenting themselves as climate-friendly, but climate change hasn’t slowed down. That’s largely because big public-facing companies have shifted all their manufacturing to China. They outsource part of their supply chain to other smaller manufacturers and R&D firms so they can weasel out of taking responsibility for their pollution.
If we want to get serious about stopping climate change, we have to hold corporations like Pfizer accountable for all the pollution they’re responsible for—not just the pollution they’re willing to tell us about.
That’s exactly what SumOfUs members did when we changed the conversation about palm oil. Hundreds of thousands of us taught the world that some of our most-loved food products from Doritos to Cornflakes were responsible for massive deforestation and the elimination of precious orangutan habitat. We turned palm oil production upside down—and that’s exactly what we’re going to do with sneaky supply-chain carbon pollution.
Tell Pfizer to come clean about its deadly supply-chain emissions now.
More information
New York Times. 13 August 2015.
Financial Times. 9 October 2016.
