Chemical & Engineering News: Business Concentrates - Eastman Enters Korean Acetate Tow Fiber Venture
According to C&EN (Jan. 5, 2009, p.13), "The acetate fiber is used to manufacture cigarette filters, a market with significant growth in Asia." Shame on Eastman Chemical for promoting, expanding and profiting from the increasing ill-health of people around the world. It is the least educated and already least healthy who will likely suffer most from Eastman's largesse.
It is hard to imagine that the company's founder, the amazing George Eastman, would support such an enterprise. From the Kodak web site: "Eastman was a stupendous factor in the education of the modern world," said an editorial in the New York Times following his death. "Of what he got in return for his great gifts to the human race he gave generously for their good; fostering music, endowing learning, supporting science in its researches and teaching, seeking to promote health and lessen human ills, helping the lowliest in their struggle toward the light, making his own city a center of the arts and glorifying his own country in the eyes of the world."
The growth in demand for cigarette filters is due to better education of the Asian markets. The markets are shifting from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes, so yes, while still unhealthy, they are safer than what is out there now. Eastman is not encouraging people to start smoking, but to move to a less dangerous option by expanding the availability of the lesser evil.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. So that makes it all right, then? By analogy, we're selling 35 mm bullets but we're not selling 45 mm ones. But there's no way to invest in a non-smoking effort or to profit from it - or is there?
ReplyDeletePeace,
Bego
Then Eastman buys chemical resin plants, not knowing what they have, not knowing the product at all,has all these plants and no idea of how to produce resin. Won't take advice from employees that do know, then can't have a person's boss to actually fire someone, they send someone else to do the firing. So husband gets fired for no reason, so we figured husband got fired for maxing out their salary plan, though they offered the salary, and husband has been retired .
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