Tyson Foods meat and poultry business ranks as second largest polluter of US waterways

Tyson Foods, Inc. is “one of the world’s largest producers of meat and poultry.” The company’s pollution footprint includes manure from its contract growers’ factory farm operations, fertilizer runoff from grain grown to feed the livestock it brings to market as meat, and waste from its processing plants.

While comprehensive data on Tyson’s share of factory farm and fertilizer runoff require some calculation, the company is required to report pollution from its processing plants to U.S. EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).

Tyson Foods Inc. and its subsidiaries dumped 104 million pounds of pollutants into waterways from 2010 to 2014 – the second highest volume of toxic discharges reported to TRI for those years.