Sophie Hurwitz, Grist

Kodak is having a fashion moment.

A few weeks ago, a keychain-sized camera-slash-accessory based on a model from 1987 sold out in a day. In some markets, the company’s compact digital cameras have outsold those from Canon or Sony. Things are going so well, Kodak has even developed a popular streetwear brand with a storefront in Seoul, luring young people with bright colors and a fun, retro vibe. Not bad for a 133-year-old company that declared bankruptcy in 2012 and in August refuted reports that it may have to shut down again.

Inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, in 1888. Over the next century, the word Kodak — which George Eastman made up — essentially became synonymous with the act of taking pictures. It democratized photography with the affordable Brownie camera in 1900, then revolutionized it again in 1935 with Kodachrome, one of the first commercially successful color films. In 1975, a Kodak engineer invented the first digital camera — and by the end of that decade, the company was making billions of dollars per year.

But throughout much of the 20th century, Kodak was also, for all intents and purposes, a U.S. military contractor. Alongside its subsidiary Eastman Chemical, Kodak produced warplane lacquer, gas mask parts, and refined uranium for the Manhattan Project.

All of this left a long trail of environmental damage, most notably in Rochester. In the 1940s and 1950s, Kodak disposed of low-level radioactive waste in a local landfill. By 1990, the company had been repeatedly cited for mishandling hazardous chemicals, including failing to report toxic spills, illegally discharging solvents into the city’s sewer system, and flouting air pollution regulations. People living near the factory began to notice clusters of rare diseases. In 1994, Kodak agreed to an $8 million settlement to repair leaking sewers that had carried industrial waste beneath the city for decades. According to an Environmental Working Group report released that year, during the first half of the 1990s, the company released more recognized carcinogens into the water than any other polluter in New York.

In her new book, Tales of Militant Chemistry, film historian Alice Lovejoy reveals this little-known aspect of the film industry, profiling both Kodak and its German contemporary, Agfa, a film company which at one point retooled a portion of its factory to produce poison gas for World War I. Agfa, too, polluted the towns in which its factories resided — even inspiring a documentary film, Bitterness in Bitterfeld, which, as Lovejoy recounts, was then shared clandestinely throughout East Germany’s underground environmental movement.

Although Kodak has since pledged to cut emissions and committed tens of millions of dollars to cleanup — and now posts regular Earth Day missives about corporate-sustainability goals — much of that polluting legacy remains. When asked about the history Lovejoy outlines in her book, Kodak sent a copy of its current sustainability report and declined to comment further.

“A company like Kodak, which we think of as this company that pioneered the snapshot that lives in this cultural realm, is deeply embedded in changing the substance of our world,” Lovejoy told Grist. That has had a profound impact on the environment and on frontline communities. But to most of the world, it’s still just the company that makes cameras. In her book, Lovejoy recounts the story of a Kodak representative telling people impacted by a methylene chloride spill, “We’ve never been thought of as a chemical company … we just made the yellow boxes.”

That, Lovejoy said, might be the company’s public image, but it was never the truth. “Internally, they identified themselves as a chemical company,” she said. And for Lovejoy, “the environment and the military can’t be separated.”

“The history of this material comes through poison gas, and it comes through the atomic bomb, and it comes through all of these materials that are really part of the history of the 20th and now 21st century.”

Household names like DuPont, General Electric, and Exxon are among those that have similarly left the land, the water, and the air in the communities around them polluted — often while also serving as contractors for entities such as the Department of Defense. All have kept their environmental and social harms (and military ties) largely out of public view until decades after the fact, when they’re sometimes forced to pay for remediation.

Since then, some of these companies have pivoted into the circular economy, Lovejoy explained. Among them is Eastman Chemical, the Tennessee-based Kodak subsidiary. Today, it works mostly in plastics, as Grist has reported, and has scooped up federal decarbonization grants despite knowing that plastics recycling only sort of works. In July, President Donald Trump gave Eastman Chemical a two-year exemption from an environmental regulation that would require it to report carcinogenic emissions. Kodak itself, meanwhile, still makes much of the world’s film in Rochester — but at a vastly smaller scale than it once did.

“Tales of Militant Chemistry” shows how the products a company is famous for might be only a tiny part of its social and environmental legacy. That lesson applies to products like smartphones and solar panels today, Lovejoy said. “Is film around anymore? Yeah, sort of, but it’s not what it used to be,” Lovejoy said. “But the environmental impacts are still with us, and they will be for a very, very long time.”

“This isn’t just a Kodak story,” Lovejoy said. It’s a story of how resource-intensive, even violent industries can often be obscured by great PR. Just as the uranium nitrite used as a toner for Kodak film depended on colonial mining in the Belgian Congo, batteries and solar panels are similarly dependent on extractive industries.

“I think we need to have a more realistic view of what companies like these are and do,” Lovejoy said. “For those of us who consume a lot of media, that means understanding the deeper global networks that underpin our devices or our experiences at the cinema or the shows that we’re watching while we’re streaming.”

It’s only been a few weeks since the Trump administration and lawmakers like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley succeeded in derailing the Grain Belt Express, a high-voltage transmission line that would have brought clean energy to much of the upper Midwest. It’s not clear whether the project will go forward, but it’s already clear that people will pay more for electricity as a result — and nowhere is that more clear than in Missouri.

The Grain Belt Express would have carried 5,000 kilowatts of wind power from Kansas across Missouri and Illinois into Indiana. The 800-mile project, slated to cost $11 billion and scheduled to begin construction next year, has drawn fire from critics, whose opposition includes its use of eminent domain to cross private property, and has been the target of Republican opponents like Hawley for well over a decade.

After years of lawsuits, regulatory review, and political battles in the Show-Me State, Invenergy, the nation’s largest privately-held clean energy supplier, received state approval from Kansas and Missouri in 2019. It began acquiring access to land as similar work proceeded elsewhere along the route. In March, Andrew Bailey, who was until recently Missouri’s attorney general, urged Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to cancel the loan. He called the Grain Belt Express a project by “far-left deep staters” dedicated to undermining farmers.

Bailey opened an investigation into the project in July, alleging that Invenergy had overstated its economic benefits, and called on the state Public Service commission to reconsider its approval. President Trump, with Hawley’s encouragement, reportedly called Energy Secretary Chris Wright and told him to cancel a $5 billion conditional loan the Department of Energy approved in November to underwrite construction. The agency did just that on July 23, a move Hawley called “a huge win” for Missouri.

However, it’s likely that Missourians will suffer if the line is not built: It was predicted to save state ratepayers almost $18 billion in utility bills in the coming years. (Bailey has called that figure an overstatement.) Jesse Jenkins, of Princeton’s REPEAT Project, which analyzes how federal climate and energy policies impact emissions and energy systems, said it’s useful to think of Grain Belt Express as “roughly five nuclear reactors’ worth of low-cost energy.” Thirty-nine municipal utilities across Missouri — including several in the same rural communities Hawley claims would be harmed by the transmission line — have already signed up to tap that supply. If the line is not built, “all the customers in all these cities are going to see higher prices than they normally would have,” said Andy Knott of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

Hawley’s offices in Washington, D.C and Columbia, Missouri did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

This, on top of the local impacts of the recently-passed One Big Beautiful Bill spending package — which one study suggested will cause Missouri electricity bills to skyrocket more than any other state — could create a dire situation for those already struggling to make ends meet. Kera Mashek, of the United Way of Greater Kansas City said more than 14,000 people have called the Kansas City area 211 line seeking utility assistance so far this year.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is expected to increase Missourians’ electricity bills $240 a year by 2030 and $800 a year by 2035, according to a study from Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy policy think tank. It also could hinder climate progress. Clean energy tax credits granted by the Biden administration and rescinded by the Trump administration likely would have incentivized power companies to bring cheaper energy sources online. Without them, they’ll probably continue repairing aging coal-fired plant infrastructure indefinitely, said Megan Mahajan, a co-author of the study.

The idea that people’s bills are going to go up is “certainly concerning for us,” Mashek said. Given the looming cuts to Medicaid and federal assistance programs, particularly those that help low-income people pay energy bills, under Trump’s spending package, “We could be looking at a very dire situation for a lot of households that are suddenly just simply not going to be able to afford to keep their lights on,” Mashek said.

Invenergy accused Hawley of “trying to deprive Americans of billions of dollars in energy cost savings, thousands of jobs, and grid reliability.” It plans to proceed with construction of what it calls “the largest transmission infrastructure project in US history” using private financing. It’s got plenty of backers, including Blackstone, the world’s biggest private equity firm.

“A privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance while delivering billions of dollars in energy cost savings, strengthening grid reliability and resiliency, and creating thousands of American jobs,” the company said in a statement. It might also connect a natural-gas plant to what was initially a green-energy line, the company announced in July.

Invenergy took Bailey’s office to court, demanding that the attorney general withdraw the investigation. But last week, Bailey announced he’d be leaving his post to join the FBI. Governor Mike Kehoe appointed former state House Speaker and federal prosecutor Catherine Hanaway, who most recently worked as lead counsel for Grain Belt Express. Hanaway says the case will proceed, and that she has recused herself.

For Knott, of Beyond Coal, the decade-plus battle over Grain Belt Express is less about what would benefit Missourians, and more about a culture war over what “energy dominance” means. “They have politicized clean energy,” he said, “Which is honestly just a very weird and illogical thing to do, because clean energy is much, much cheaper than fossil fuels, and we need as much energy on the grid as possible right now.”