Source: http://www.ctpost.com, February 7, 2016
By: Hugh Bailey
They linger at the bottom of rivers, in the walls of buildings and in the ground itself. Once ubiquitous for industrial purposes, polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, have long been known to pose serious health risks.
Yet nearly four decades after the U.S. stopped producing them, PCBs remain problematic. Because they don’t break down on their own, they continue to weigh heavily both on businesses that used them and others that want to build where they are found.
“The cleanup is very challenging, and the process is a very time-consuming one,” said Arthur Bogen, owner of Down to Earth environmental consulting firm, who has worked on cleanup projects around the state.
They are among the more common toxins at brownfield sites, which mostly refer to former factories that have pollution left over from manufacturing. Regulations based on the harm PCBs can cause mean millions of dollars must be spent to make them safe again.
PCBs were manufactured in the U.S. between 1929 and 1979. A number of factors, including chemical stability, led to their use in countless applications, from electrical equipment to rubber products to window caulk, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
GE and the EPA have spent years coming up with a plan for their cleanup, with GE bearing responsibility even though it was legal to dispose of them at the time.
The company and the EPA are engaged in informal talks, while at the same time GE — which will move its Fairfield, Connecticut, headquarters to Boston starting this summer — has formally disputed the federal cleanup plan. Jim Murphy of EPA’s Region 1 in Boston said GE’s dispute was “consistent with comments they’ve provided in the past.”
GE’s position has long been that less disruption of the river could be more beneficial in the long run, saying the EPA’s plan “goes beyond what is necessary to protect human health because a remedy that is less extensive, less disruptive and less costly would likewise achieve levels that EPA considers protective of human health.”
The cost of this portion of the cleanup has been estimated at $619 million over 13 years. The EPA will respond to GE by the end of the month, after which an administrator will issue a decision.
In buildings
PCBs have been shown to cause cancer, as well as negative effects on the immune, reproductive and nervous systems. And they are commonly found in buildings around the Northeast and beyond, with the EPA citing potentially widespread use of PCB-containing materials in buildings built or renovated from about 1950 to 1979.
That accounts for thousands of buildings including hundreds of schools, though the EPA adds that “the presence of PCBs alone is not necessarily a cause for immediate alarm.”
There are questions about how people become exposed. In buildings, that would likely come from direct contact or from inhaling contaminated dust. Last year, in response to reports that dozens of Connecticut schools are likely laced with PCBs, Sen. Chris Murphy wrote a letter to the EPA asking for help to test and pay for remediation.
The EPA’s response cited expense. “While the EPA recognizes the burden for local schools and communities in dealing with PCBs, the agency does not have funding resources to help defray the cost of PCB remediation activities,” the agency stated, to which Murphy responded that he would work with the Senate Appropriations Committee to see that money was made available.
“Connecticut has old schools, and we need to take PCB contamination seriously,” Murphy said in a statement. “The reality is that many of the schools most acutely affected are poorer schools, and the federal government should step in to help communities that are most in-need and at-risk.”
Most sites with these toxins aren’t like the Housatonic, where the party that caused the contamination is not in question. Because Monsanto was a manufacturer of PCBs for decades, that company has been the target of lawsuits over cleanups, including one by the city of Hartford in October.
Hartford wants Monsanto to pay for the removal and remediation of PCBs at Clark Elementary School and other city-owned buildings. Monsanto has argued in other cases that it should bear no responsibility because the substance was legal at the time it was sold.
For buildings where exposure can be contained, the advice from the EPA is often restricted to basic remedies. “We want people to follow best practices, which includes having good air quality and keeping areas clean from dust,” said Kim Tisa, the PCB coordinator in EPA’s Region 1, which includes Connecticut.
The situation becomes critical only when the contaminants are disturbed, such as during demolition of an old factory.
In the ground
Bogen, who has worked extensively on cleanups in the Naugatuck Valley, said that among many contaminants that can complicate a remediation, PCBs are a special class.
“The costs associated with the assessment and remediation are much greater than with any other element,” he said.
Because it’s so common and its risks well understood, regulations require nearly complete removal, whereas other contaminants can be encapsulated on a property — left in place but kept away from contact. This dramatically cuts cleanup costs.
“The limits of what can be left in terms of PCBs are very low, and that translates to considerable cleanup costs,” Bogen said.
Though the cost of cleanup is supposed to be on whoever created the problem, often the guilty party is defunct or impossible to find.
“I’ve worked with a private client on a site where a private developer stepped into a terrible PCB situation that was unknown to anyone beforehand. It made the cost of the cleanup 20 times the value of the land,” Bogen said.
There are also questions about whether PCBs are treated differently simply because they are so common and the dangers well understood.
“You have so many more demands on ever-tighter budgets, but it can’t be treated as if it’s not there,” he said. “The question is, what is the exposure? We need to determine the level of risk.”