Kodaikanal (mercury thermometer factory)

The plant was moved from the United States to India in the early 1980s (Wikipedia gives 1982 in one entry and 1983 in the other) and belonged to Pond's; it passed to Hindustan Unilever in 1987, when Unilever acquired Chesebrough-Pond's globally. Kodaikanal is a hill station in Tamil Nadu surrounded by shola, the native montane forest.

In early 2001 public interest groups found, in an interior part of the shola forest, a pile of broken thermometers with mercury residues. The company later admitted having disposed of mercury-contaminated waste there. After protests the factory closed in March 2001. An investigation by the Department of Atomic Energy found free mercury in the air of Kodaikanal at a thousand times the normal level.

In 2003 the campaign led by Greenpeace together with the workers forced the company to collect 290 tonnes of mercury waste from the forest and send it back to the United States for recycling. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board then recommended a remediation standard of 20 mg/kg of mercury in soil, criticised by campaigners as far weaker than what the company would have had to meet in the United Kingdom; pre-remediation work began in May 2009. In March 2016 Hindustan Unilever reached an out-of-court settlement with 511 former workers, with an ex-gratia payment of undisclosed amount.