GE finally agrees to clean up PCBs in Hudson River

Are we ecomagining things? General Electric Co. has finally agreed to dredge the PCBs it long ago dumped in the upper Hudson River of New York state, nearly 30 years after the contamination was discovered. With 43 miles of tainted river bottom to tend and total costs estimated at $700 million, it will be one of the biggest and most expensive industrial cleanups in history -- although it's still unclear how much GE will do. The company has committed to Phase One -- removing the worst-contaminated deposits, about 10 percent of all PCB-laced sediments -- but won't make a decision about Phase Two's dredging of less-contaminated mud until Phase One is complete. Some eco-advocates fear GE may yet weasel out of cleaning up the bulk of its mess. "It looks like there's a loophole big enough to drive dredging barges through," says the Sierra Club's Chris Ballantyne. But federal officials insist they've reserved the right to force GE to do the entire job -- or bill the company millions for cleaning it up themselves.

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Lower Hudson River clean enough for dipping

A dozen-plus locations along the lower Hudson River in New York state are once again fit for taking a dip, thanks to decades of cleanup efforts. Accounts of swimming in the Hudson date back to colonial times, but by the mid-20th century the river was an unholy stew of industrial waste and raw sewage. Cleanup started in the 1960s, and roughly four decades later, a state study has found that much of the Hudson is largely pollutant- and poop-free. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation, which conducted the study, advocates restoring public beaches from the tip-top of Manhattan to just south of Albany. Local governments can apply for state grants to underwrite beach reopenings; some greens hope the state will also directly allocate resources to help communities restore the beaches. Meanwhile, many New Yorkers are finding other ways to dive in, like from their favorite rock on the riverbank. Ah, good news. We'd almost forgotten what it smells like.

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Meanwhile, in another legal victory on the other side of the country, a federal court yesterday rejected General Electric's constitutional challenge to the U.S. EPA's power to force the company to clean up the Hudson River. From the 1940s to the 1970s, GE dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the upper Hudson, where 500,000 to 700,000 pounds of toxic sludge remain today. For years, environmentalists and GE haggled over how best to clean the river -- a dispute that was settled last year when the EPA mandated a $490 million plan to dredge 40 miles of the Hudson under the Superfund cleanup program. GE challenged that plan in court, saying the Superfund program violated due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. But yesterday, U.S. District Judge John Bates said GE did not have standing to sue, because the EPA has not taken legal action against the company.

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Outgoing Michigan Gov. John Engler (R) is trying to relax the state standard for dioxin pollution, a move that unhappy environmentalists say is designed to minimize Dow Chemical's financial liability for future cleanup efforts. The proposed change, which has also angered Gov.-elect Jennifer Granholm (D) and regional U.S. EPA officials, would increase by more than nine-fold the amount of dioxin permissible in the soil in Midland, Mich., where Dow is headquartered. Dioxin can disrupt human immune and reproductive systems and cause cancer; its presence in Midland and areas downstream stems from Dow's half-century history of manufacturing Agent Orange, mustard gas, chlorinated pesticides, and chlorophenol. The clean up may result in one of the largest corporate pollution cases since the U.S. EPA ordered General Electric last year to pony up a half a billion bucks to remove PCBs from New York's Hudson River. Yesterday, Michigan environmental groups sued to block a proposed consent order that would allow the lower dioxin standard to take effect before Engler leaves office.

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U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman said yesterday that her agency would order General Electric to spend almost $500 million to dredge PCBs from the upper Hudson River. In doing so, Whitman disregarded a multi-million-dollar P.R. campaign by the giant company claiming that dredging would not improve the river's health. Enviros, who had feared that closed-door meetings between the EPA and GE would result in a scaled-back cleanup plan, said the announcement was a big-time victory.

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Environmental groups and officials in New York state are concerned that General Electric may be making headway in its campaign to scuttle a federal plan forcing it to dredge the Hudson River for pollution. U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced in August that she would proceed with a $500 million, Clinton-era plan to order G.E. to remove the millions of pounds of PCBs it dumped into the river. The U.S. EPA was scheduled to finalize details of the plan in September, but that deadline has been extended indefinitely because of the terrorist attacks. Since the terrorist attacks, which came after the public-comment period on the plan ended, G.E. has met behind closed doors at least twice with top EPA officials. State officials and enviros say that they are being kept out of the loop and that G.E. is going over the heads of regional EPA staff to cut deals directly with Whitman's staff. They believe that the company is lobbying the agency to set unrealistic performance standards for the cleanup that would throw the whole plan into disarray.

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Three stories have hit the news lately concerning three corporations that have done -- or may have done -- serious environmental harm. They are coping with the situation in very different ways. Taken together, the stories suggest an odd combination of hope and cynicism. There are signs of honesty, good will, real learning. But the damage is great, and the learning is slow.

Story No. 1 is the latest development in a decades-long saga involving General Electric. In the 1940s, two GE capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, N.Y., started using the new chemicals called PCBs and spilling them lavishly into the Hudson River. Thirty years later the nation adopted a Clean Water Act, and PCBs were found to be bad news. They last almost forever in the environment, they concentrate in animal and human tissue, they are linked with cancer and reproductive failure.

By the time PCBs had been fully indicted, millions of pounds of them had sunk into the mud of the Hudson for 200 miles downstream from the GE plants. There followed a 25-year battle about how the river should be cleaned up and who should pay for it. GE fought in the way we have unfortunately come to expect from corporations. Denial, obfuscation, leaning upon politicians, threatening to pull 55,000 jobs out of the state if the company were held liable.

Now the EPA has ordered PCB-laced mud to be dredged out of the Hudson at a cost to GE of a billion or so dollars. GE is objecting, saying the river has safely covered over the contaminated sediment. The company has a point. Disturbing the mud could churn up more damage than leaving it. Once dredged it would still have to be put somewhere. But the EPA has a point too. A storm or flood could stir up old sediment, and meanwhile it slowly percolates down to the sea.

The problem for GE is that, though it may or may not be credible now, its past behavior has destroyed its credibility in this matter. Negative legacies can last a long time.

So here's a better story. On May 11, William C. Ford, chair of the Ford Motor Company (and great-grandson of founder Henry Ford), told his stockholders that sports utility vehicles are gross polluters and dangerous on the road. Ford, of course, makes the biggest road hog of all, the Excursion, which weighs twice as much as a Grand Cherokee and gets 10 miles to the gallon. SUVs, said Ford, are three times more likely than regular cars to kill occupants of other cars in a crash. And their own occupants are not safe either. Death rates in SUVs are as high as in cars, because SUVs tend to roll over and to crumple.

Breathtaking confession. Maybe the era of corporate denial is passing. Indeed, Ford warned that if car companies don't fix the problems of SUVs, their reputations might someday fall to the level of tobacco companies.

He talked of fixing the trucks, however, making them safer and more fuel-efficient, not ceasing to make them. Honesty, yes; sacrifice of profit for public safety, not yet. But in the third story, a company goes one step further, phasing out a problem product by its own decision.

The company is 3M, which prides itself on its environmental record. The questionable product is an organic fluorine compound of many uses. Most of us use it to repel stains and call it Scotchgard. Three years ago, the company was doing a routine blood test of its workers, part of its ongoing concern for workers' health. For comparison with people who do not work in a chemical factory, it also tested blood from a commercial blood bank.

It found tiny amounts of Scotchgard in the general public's blood. Utterly surprised, the company looked further and found its trademark organofluorines in people and wildlife all over the globe. The only place it wasn't found was in the stored blood of Korean War soldiers -- samples taken before Scotchgard was invented.

Another immortal human-made chemical. But does it do harm? There was no evidence of any, until 3M fed huge doses to rats and monkeys. The monkeys had convulsions. The rats' offspring all died.

The company informed the EPA promptly of these findings. Then, after months of soul-searching, it announced that it will stop making Scotchgard by the end of this year. That means a loss of $500 million in annual sales -- about 3 percent of total revenues -- and a threat to jobs in three factories. It was a decision that EPA may have forced at some point. The company might have been able to fight it off, but its voluntary phaseout saved everyone years of struggle and expense.

William Ford has received praise for his honesty, and 3M even more praise for its phaseout. Katherine E. Reed, 3M's director of environmental technology, set a standard for all companies by saying, "We believe that our responsibility for materials continues into disposal. It's a concept we call life-cycle management."

It's wonderful to hear even one company say that. We would hope to hear more. Meanwhile, PCBs sit in the Hudson, SUVs assault our lungs, our climate, and our safety, and molecules of stain repellent circulate through our veins. Negative legacies can last a long time.

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