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19. Jim Morris — Don't Worry, Nothing Here Will Hurt You

You may have Goodyear tires on your car or truck. Many Americans do. Goodyear is the leading tire manufacturer in this country.

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What you may not know is that the process of making these tires has led to horrendous impacts on the environment and human health.

We think of tires as being made of “rubber,” derived from the sap of rubber trees, mostly from Southeast Asia—a process that’s led to massive deforestation in the region. However, natural rubber makes up only a portion of a modern tire, usually around 19% in cars and 34% in trucks. The rest of the tire is made up of a mix of other materials, including synthetic rubber, derived from petrochemicals, and other chemical additives.

In episode 16 of Chrysalis, I spoke with Sean Dixon of Puget Soundkeeper about the toxic effects of one of the chemical additives in tires, called 6PPD.

A different chemical additive, which prevents tires from cracking, is produced using a chemical called ortho-toluidine, or simply O-T. This chemical causes bladder cancer, and it generates another chemical as a byproduct, called diphenylamine or DPA, which is a possible carcinogen that may damage the bladder, kidneys, and liver.

Right now, I’m in Buffalo, New York, right next door to Niagara Falls, where there’s a Goodyear plant that’s been using ortho-toluidine since 1957.

Since the 1980s, at least 78 workers at Goodyear have developed bladder cancer, making it one of the nation’s worst known cancer clusters at a single workplace.

Jim Morris is a Houston-based investigative journalist, who has spent his career tracking the path of toxic chemicals through American industry and into the bloodstreams of workers. In his recent book, The Cancer Factory, Morris tells the story of workers at the Goodyear chemical plant in Niagara Falls who were exposed to ortho-toluidine and what their plight reveals about the ongoing failure of American industry and government to protect its workers.

I interviewed Jim, live on stage, at the University at Buffalo, on September 26, 2024. In our conversation, we explore the failures to protect workers and the environment from deadly chemicals and what changes are needed to prevent these tragedies in the future.

At the event, we were very lucky to have one of the Goodyear workers and bladder cancer victims in the audience. His name is Harry Weist, and we invite him to say a few words at the beginning. Then, at the end, he comes on stage to participate in the question and answer session. Hearing from him directly, with tears in his eyes, is very powerful.

This story is historical, but it is also very much alive in the present. Just a week before we recorded the interview, Jim broke another Goodyear story—this time, rather than being about workplace exposure, the story was about ortho-toluidine pollution in the neighborhoods around Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant. Jim wrote the article together with Emyle Watkins, an investigative reporter at WBFO, Buffalo’s NPR Station.

Jim and his collaborators at Public Health Watch, WBFO, and Inside Climate News, obtained previously undisclosed Department of Environmental Conservation documents through open-records requests that show that Goodyear has been putting ortho-toluidine in the air around its Niagara Falls plant at levels 1,000% higher than what New York State regulators now consider safe for the public to breathe.

Here’s what he and Emyle Watkins write in the article:

“The state officially knew of the excess plant emissions no later than February 2023, when a Goodyear contractor submitted a report detailing test results. But a January 2010 email to Goodyear from Jacqueline DiPronio, then an environmental program specialist with the DEC in Buffalo, suggests the state had suspicions about the pollution-control equipment 13 years earlier, after the company submitted data of dubious quality.”

Whether it was a year and half earlier, or 13 years earlier, the Department of Environmental Conservation did not notify the public after it learned of the elevated ortho-toluidine levels in the air. The families living near the plant in Niagara Falls did not know they were being exposed to elevated ortho-toluidine levels until Jim and his collaborators published their reporting.

Soon after they published this article and several follow-up articles, the Department of Conservation initiating a process that will force Goodyear to install new technology that brings the level of ortho-toluidine emissions from the plant into compliance with current regulations. Many activists are still dissatisfied with how the state is addressing the problem, but Goodyear must now have the new pollution-control technology installed and functioning by the end of October 2026.

That’s the power of great journalism.

If you listened to my interview with Lois Gibbs that I released last week, a lot of this might sound familiar. Lois’s husband in the 1970s worked at this same Goodyear plant, while she was at home fighting to uncover the truth about the chemicals buried under her Love Canal neighborhood.

Jim quotes Lois Gibbs in his article saying, “‘Nothing changes in Niagara Falls. Nothing changes at the DEC.’” She also told him that “emissions from Goodyear’s stacks used to fall on workers’ vehicles in the plant parking lot and dissolve the paint. The company regularly paid to have the vehicles repainted.”

What is clear to me from all of these stories is that these chemical companies are run by people who have shown again and again that they are willing to put the lives of their workers and their neighbors at great risk in order to maximize profits for themselves.

While government officials in New York have hardly showed a backbone or a sense of urgency with regard to Goodyear’s toxic emissions, at least we’re in New York, where we have some functioning environmental regulations.

The role of state governments is more important than ever now that we have a president in the White House who calls environmental regulations “illegitimate impediments.” In July of 2025, President Trump gave two-year exemptions from EPA emissions standards to over 100 facilities, including chemical plants, refineries, and other polluting industries around the country. And the people who live in the neighborhoods around these facilities have limited, if any, information about what they and their children are breathing or drinking on a daily basis.

As always, we need good journalism to expose the abuses of government and industry. Not surprisingly, Trump has also waged an unprecedented assault on journalism.

Jim Morris is one of those essential journalists. He has won more than eighty-five awards, including the George Polk award, the Sidney Hillman award, three National Association of Science Writers awards, and three Edward R. Murrow awards. He is now the executive director and editor-in-chief at Public Health Watch.

I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis. You can subscribe at johnfiege.earth, where you will also find show notes and all episodes of the podcast, plus my writing, photographs, and films.

Here is Jim Morris.

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Credits

This episode was produced and edited by Amy Cavanaugh, with additional editing by Isabella Fleming. Music is by Daniel Rodríguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.