William Sanjour is perhaps the EPA’s best-known whistleblower. He spent many of his nearly 30 years at the EPA as a Branch Chief exposing government corruption and assisting local and national efforts to combat incinerators, hazardous waste dumps, and other EPA and government abuses. He also testified before Congress many times. William Sanjour was featured in the documentaries The Killing Ground (ABC, 1979), In Our Water (1982) and The World According to Monsanto (2008). For our Independent Science News website he wrote two articles that encapsulate some of what he learned in his ‘career’ as a whistleblower (How the Once Tiny Waste Management Industry Captured EPA and Became VERY BIG and Designed to Fail: Why Regulatory Agencies Don’t Work).
We organised the collection and scanning and therefore the preservation of his personal work files (2,626 documents), which we have now donated to the UCSF Industry Documents Library. IDL curated and annotated these documents and they now hold these exceptional documents openly accessible for inspection and research and for perpetuity.