It's about corporate reponsibility

A friend of mine sent me copy of this article today. It has to do with pharmaceutical companies that dumped 271 million pounds of drugs into waterways that often led to water that the public eventually consumed. In a time like this where there is more and more emphasis placed on the responsibilities that companies owe the public these corporations need to be held accountable.
Another part of this story that frustrates me is the fact that federal officials do not know the extent of the contamination because they have no program in place that tracks this type of activity. For all we know this process could have been going on for even longer than the public realizes.
News stories today talk about financially irresponsible decisions being made by companies but I feel it is just as important to expose other types of irresponsible actions that companies take. Once consumers are given the information that certain companies are not being responsible they can alter their purchasing decisions as a result of what they have learned. This penalizes the companies for being irresponsible because they are losing potential profit from people who previously may have bough what they had to offer.
Now I am a person who can have a cynical view of some people of society especially when I see a story like this one where there is a fairly blatant case of people just not caring. It would not shock me if there were people receiving kickbacks from the drug companies that allow them to fly under the radar with their current practices.