Hudson River cleanup

Much work has been done on the PCB problem. Potentially dangerous amounts of PCBs have been found in fish. At the time of this writing the EPA and General Electric are planning a 500 million cleanup of the Hudson River sediment contaminated with PCBs even after many years of being banned. A very toxic trace contaminant in European PCBs that may be present in Monsanto s PCBs is tetrachlorodibenzofiiran, the second most toxic chemical known to humans. 

As late as 1975, industrial concerns were legally discharging PCBs into the Hudson River. In 1977, the EPA banned the direct discharge into waterways, and since 1979 their manufacture, processing, and distribution have been prohibited. In 2000 the EPA specified certain sections of the Hudson River for cleanup of PCBs. In 2009, a plan to decontaminate parts of the Hudson River by dredging was finally implemented. See The Chemistry of...Bacterial Dehaloge-nation of a PCB Derivative (Section 21.11 A) for a potential method of PCB remediation. 

General Electric (GE) Corporation produced polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at its plants in Eort Edward and Hudson Falls, New York, for use as dielectrics and coolant fluids in transformers, capacitors, and electric motors. From 1947 through 1977, they discharged the runoff from this process into the Hudson River. In 1983, theU.S. Enviromnental Protection Agency declared 200 miles of the Hudson River a superfund site, and sought to develop a cleanup and remediation plan to remove the PCBs that contaminated the sediment at the bottom of the river. Phase 1 cleanup was completed in 2009, at a cost to GE of 460,000,000. A projected Phase 2 effort will be even larger and more expensive (Highlight 1.3). 

Two GE capacitor plants located in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, New York, discharged PCBs now found in water, sediment, fish, and the whole Hudson River ecosystem. GE agreed to perform Phase 1 of the cleanup process, which started in May 2009. The dredging of the upper Hudson River was set for about six months to remove approximately 10% of the PCBs. GE has not committed to the removal of the full scope of the contaminants, which is the goal of Phase 2. The issue in this story is not the cost (the cost of the ERA S proposal to GE was 460 million), but rather if the cleanup will work. GE does not believe that dredging is the solution to the problan and has invested 200 million on a groundwater pump to reduce the flow of PCBs from the bedrock below its Hudson Falls facility from 5 pounds to 3 ounces a day. GE officials have pointed out that the level of PCBs in fish is down 90% since 1977. The Hudson River is only one site out of 77 other sites where GE is responsible for the cleanup. 

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