Alternative path, like with General Electric:
Invent seemingly fantastic new material. Discover it is harmful to humans and wildlife, accumulates in groundwater, etc. Bury that discovery.
Get caught after decades of wild profits, the occasional secret settlement, and spend a decade more fighting legal action before finally running out of appeals or the writing is on the wall, and accept it and pay out.
Start selling water filtration systems, thus profiting off people dealing with your pollution.
This is what I find so frustrating about "the fight against cancer." I'm convinced cancer is so prevalent because corporations are poisoning the shit out of our environment, and thus our water supply, our food, our air. Because we're not equipped with timestamping chemical detection systems, it's difficult to identify the exposure that caused it or increased the person's risk, so industry gets a "freebie" death nobody can pin to them. As long as the chemical isn't toxic enough to be obvious - the companies get away scott free, despite an extensive history of the chemical industry time and time again coming up with some major novel chemical that comes to be used all over society and turns out to be toxic.
Bill Moyers once submitted his blood to a lab and asked them to test for everything they could identify in terms of industrial chemicals, pesticides, etc. The blood was a veritable toxic soup (and some of the control sample containers were contaminated from the supplier, showing how pervasive the toxins are): https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/popup_bb_02.html
You don't "fight cancer" doing walks and charity balls and cute-kid-starts-fundraiser-because-friend-dies-from-leukemia. You fight cancer by addressing the toxins being pumped into us in the name of profit and "bettering society", allowed to get away with it because of how difficult it is to show any particular chemical directly caused the cancer.
Growth and consumption under all circumstances. And we’re fuelling it with our personal behavior.
If only the vaccine-autism energy could be directed in the right place
PS not to diminish GE's game but they certainly weren't the only player. This one always stuck with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease#Wastewater_tr...
It's a bit disheartening to see that the Bill Moyer's documentary came out in 2001, and not much has changed to keep these corporations accountable.