A quick overview of some archiving and exhibition projects related to Formosa Plastics:
No More Nurdles is a WordPress website run by shrimp fisherwoman Diane Wilson. Over the last 30 years, Wilson has collected leaked documents, emails, oral histories, photographs about Formosa Plastics in Texas, some of which are made available on the website. "Nurdles" are small plastic pellets that Formosa and other plastic producers routinely discharge into waterways outside of their manufacturing plants. Together with bags of pellets collected outside the plant, the material have recently been used in a lawsuit against Formosa, resulting in a $50 million settlement and zero-discharge order.
NurdlePatrol is a citizen science project that maps the release of plastic pellets. The data is submitted by volunteers, including activists like Diane Wilson. The project also received $1 million in additional funding as part of the settlement with Formosa in Texas.
When The South Wind Blows was a 2013 museum exhibition held at the Natural History Museum in Tainan, Taiwan. The exhibit featured 102 black-and-white photographs that focus on the residents in Taixi, a small village impacted by pollution from a Formosa petrochemical complex in Yunlin County, Taiwan. According to the curators, the goal of the exhibit was to explore how role natural science museums can "engage in contemporary issues" but also to convey the "human stories" of a fenceline community (Huang & Chen 2018).
ToxicDocs is a digital repository of declassified industry documents, including over 1,300 entries linked to Formosa Plastics. The website is run by historians and public health scientists in New York (Rosner et al. 2018). Making large amounts of documents available and easily searchable is an explicit design goal.
The Industry Documents Library is a digital archive hosted at the University of San Francisco. While initially focused on disclosed documents from litigation against the tobacco industry, the project now includes material from different industries that "influence public health" (pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, chemicals, food, and opioids). The repository lists around 30 entries that mention Formosa Plastics. For example, I found a scanned copy of an email written by what I presume to be representatives of the tobacco industry in 1996. The author cites a USA Today news article about how employers and workplaces accommodate the smoking habits of their employees, arguing that the article could be used favorably for public relations. An example in the article is the introduction of see-through "smoking booths" at the Formosa Plant in Texas, characterized as "one of the companies most accepting of smoking workers". Like ToxicDocs, the main goal of the repository seems to be providing access to the documents and associated meta-data, with the potential to find documents that cut across industry domains.
Oil and Gas Watch is a website run by the Environmental Integrity Project to track the expansion of the petrochemical industry in the United States. Currently, the sites features entries for three Formosa projects, including the plant in Point Comfort, Texas. Entries include brief updates about the plant operations, information about toxic emissions, and an overview of permits, often with links to primary documents.
In addition to archives focused on the petrochemical industry, I have found inspiration in projects like the Interference Archive in New York, a largely physical collection of documents related to social movements, which also regularly host community events and exhibitions.
