What are some major chemical disasters that have happened around the world ?
There are of course many examples that can be put here, but some of the larger ones are described below. Bhopal is probably the worst, as the other answerer notes. A pesticide factory suffered a leak, releasing methyl isocyanate and other toxic gases. The disaster seems to have been caused by poor maintenance and inadequate safety procedures. The Four Big Pollution Diseases of Japan provide other examples. In the Minamata Bay disaster, a chemical factory was using a mercury compound as a catalyst. They removed the catalyst from the waste before dumping it into a local river, but didn’t know that small amounts of methylmercury were produced as a byproduct of the reaction. Methylmercury is a highly toxic mercury compound that can also be produced from mercury metal by bacteria. In this case, methylmercury was particularly insidious because it was not captured by the factory’s waste treatment, allowing it to be released into the environment. Methylmercury gets concentrated in organisms as
