IPE's pollution database let Western brands police suppliers

China's local environmental regulators recorded factory pollution violations, but that data sat inside government systems, unpublished and effectively unusable as pressure -- local officials, whose careers depended partly on the same factories' output and tax revenue, had limited appetite to name and punish major local employers, and central enforcement capacity was thin relative to the number of facilities operating across the country. A factory owner could weigh the odds of ever facing a real consequence for dumping wastewater and reasonably conclude they were low.

Many of those same factories, however, were suppliers deep in the manufacturing chains of major Western consumer brands -- electronics, apparel, and retail companies with global reputations that depended on being seen as responsible, and whose actual leverage over a supplier's behavior, through the contracts and orders that kept that factory running, dwarfed anything a local environmental bureau could threaten.