How We Got Here: The History of PCBs
How We Got Here: The History of PCBs
This two-part series is from Rachel's Hazardous Waste News from March 1993. It was written by historian Peter Montague of the Environmental Research Foundation.
Editor’s Note — Please tap or click the headline for the full article and higher-resolution photos.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was signifiant interest in the problem of PCBs. Just a decade after manufacturing of new equipment was phased out (around 1979), lawsuits were starting to move, the EPA was conducting its reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin-like compounds, and some public interest were focused on the issue.
In part two of his series below, author Peter Montague says that PCBs are “a morality play of our time.” I have thought about this often in the decades I’ve been on this investigation. While PCBs themselves are banned from new manufacture, they remain a serious problem — and many new compounds have been devised that have similar hormonal effects, and that are everywhere, and in everyone.
One among many is C8, the active ingredient in Teflon cookware. You may not use the stuff in your own kitehcn, but almost every restaurant does. Society is drowning in plastics in a way that could only have been envisioned by the wildest dreams of their manufacturers’ marketing departments. The land is soaked in Roundup. Toxic and hormonally active drugs are excreted directly into drinking water and food supplies.
For this and other reasons, notions of the alleged “lab release” of viruses are an absurdity, a distraction and a work of fraud. The “releases” we need to be thinking about are what comes out of chemical, pharmaceutical and artificial intelligence labs.
Original web 1.0 versions of Peter’s well-informed and outstanding account of how PCB pollution got so bad, published in March 1993 in two parts, here and here.
My version of the same history is here. Peter included many details that for reasons of length, I could not, and our two tellings of the same history compliment one another well. We were working with the same sources, principal among them, document collector Carol van Strum, and toxins attorneys Paul Merrell and David McCrea. — efc
By Peter Montague, Ph. D.
IF YOU HAD TO PICK ONE CHEMICAL that best exemplified our modern situation, it might well be PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).
PCBs were first manufactured commercially in 1929 by the Swan Corporation, which later became part of Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis, Missouri.[1] Monsanto then licensed others to make PCBs and the product took off. PCBs conduct heat very well, but do not conduct electricity, and they do not burn easily.
Furthermore, they do not change chemically — or at least, they were believed to be stable — and they are not soluble in water. Therefore they are ideal insulators in big electrical transformers and capacitors (devices that store electricity). As electricity came into widespread use during the first half of this century, equipment suppliers like GE and Westinghouse became major users of PCBs.
Many of the characteristics that make PCBs ideal in industrial applications create problems in the environment. Like many other chlorinated hydrocarbons, PCBs are soluble in fat, though not in water, so they tend to accumulate in living things and to enter food webs, where they concentrate. Larger, older predators tend to accumulate PCBs in their fatty tissues, including their eggs (in the case of birds and fish) and their milk (in the case of mammals).
PCBs were first recognized as an environmental problem in 1966 when a Swedish researcher reported finding them in 200 pike from all over Sweden, in other fish, and in an eagle.[2] For the next decade, scientists accumulated information about PCBs, finding them disrupting food webs all over the planet.
The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)
By 1976, the destruction wrought by PCBs was so obvious and so well understood that even the U.S. Congress comprehended the danger and took action, outlawing the manufacture, sale, and distribution of PCBs except in "totally enclosed" systems. This was by way of a law called the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
Between 1929 and 1989, total world production of PCBs (excluding the Soviet Union) was 3.4 billion pounds, or about 57 million pounds per year. Even after the U.S. banned PCBs in 1976, world production continued at 36 million pounds per year from 1980-1984 and 22 million pounds per year, 1984-1989. The end of PCB production is still not in sight.[3]
The whereabouts of 30 percent of all PCBs (roughly a billion pounds) remains unknown. Another 30 percent reside in landfills, in storage, or in the sediments of lakes, rivers, and estuaries. Some 30 percent to 70 percent remain in use. The characteristics of PCBs (their stability and their solubility in fat) tend to move them into the oceans as time passes. Nevertheless, it is estimated that only one percent of all PCBs have, so far, reached the oceans.[3]
The one percent that have reached the oceans are causing major problems. As noted above, PCBs tend to concentrate in the food chain; the higher you are on the food chain, the greater the concentration of PCBs. Large fish, and creatures that eat large fish, tend to accumulate thousands of parts of million (ppm) in their flesh. Furthermore, by a cruel twist of fate, large birds and large marine mammals (seals, sea lions, whales, and some dolphins) lack enzyme systems to efficiently detoxify PCBs.
As a result, PCBs build up in the bodies of oceanic predators and are passed to their offspring through eggs (in the case of fish and birds) and milk (in the case of mammals). PCBs mimic hormones and are a powerful disruptor of the endocrine system that governs reproduction. Marine mammals are already having trouble reproducing.[4] It is entirely possible that, as more PCBs reach the oceans, all large mammals will disappear.[5]
Humans, too, are contaminated by PCBs and are passing these powerful toxins to their infant children through breast milk. In the U.S. and other industrialized countries, PCBs are present in breast milk at about 1 part per million (ppm) in the milk fat. An infant drinking milk contaminated at this level will take in a quantity of PCBs that is 5 times as high as the recommended "allowable daily intake" for an adult, as established by the World Health Organization.[6]
Children exposed in the womb to PCBs at levels considered "background levels" in the U.S. have been found to experience hypotonia (loss of muscle tone) and hyporeflexia (weakened reflexes) at birth, delays in psychomotor development at ages 6 and 12 months, and diminished visual recognition memory at 7 months.[7]
How Did We Get Here?
In 1937 — just eight years after Swan Chemical began manufacturing PCBs in commercial quantities--the Harvard School of Public Health hosted a one-day meeting on the problem of "systemic effects" of certain chlorinated hydrocarbons including "chlorinated diphenyl" (an early name for PCBs).[8] The meeting was attended by representatives from Monsanto, General Electric, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Halowax Corporation, among others.
Before World War I, the Halowax Corporation began manufacturing chlorinated naphthelenes as a coating for electric wire and companies like General Electric began using it. The president of Halowax, Sandford Brown, told the meeting that they had observed no problems in their workers until "the past 4 or 5 years... Then we come to the higher stages [greater number of chlorine atoms in the mixture], combined with chlorinated diphenyl and other products, and suddenly this problem is presented to us."[8] By the mid-1930s, workers at Halowax and at GE, and even some of their customers, were breaking out with chloracne--small pimples with dark pigmentation of the exposed area, followed by blackheads and pustules.
In 1936 three workers at the Halowax Company died, and Halowax then hired Harvard University researchers to expose rats to these chlorinated compounds, to see if they could discover the underlying cause.
The Harvard researchers made "a number of estimates of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the air of different factories," then designed experiments to expose rats to similar levels. They reported that "the chlorinated diphenyl is certainly capable of doing harm in very low concentrations and is probably the most dangerous [of the chlorinated hydrocarbons studied]."[8] And, they said, "These experiments leave no doubt as to the possibility of systemic effects from the chlorinated naphthalenes and chlorinated diphenyls."[8]
From a brief report on the one-day conference, we can gather that problems caused by PCB exposures were serious and widely known. Mr. F.R. Kaimer, assistant manager of General Electric's Wireworks at York, Pa., said, "It is only 1 1/2 years ago that we had in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 men afflicted with various degrees of this acne about which you all know. Eight or ten of them were very severely afflicted — horrible specimens as far as their skin conditions was concerned. One man died and the diagnosis may have attributed his death to halowax vapors, but we are not sure of that...."[8]
‘We Thought We Were Having Hysteria’
GE's medical director, Dr. B. L. Vosburgh of Schenectady, N.Y., attended the meeting. He said, "About the time we were having so much trouble at our York factory some of our customers began complaining. We thought we were having a hysteria of halowax mania throughout the country."
Monsanto Chemical Company was represented at the meeting by R. Emmett Kelly. Mr. Kelly told the meeting, "I can't contribute anything to the laboratory studies, but there has been quite a little human experimentation in the last several years, especially at our plants where we have been manufacturing this chlorinated diphenyl." He went on to describe the results of Monsanto's human experiments: "A more or less extensive series of skin eruptions which we were never able to attribute as to cause, whether it was impurity in the benzene we were using or to the chlorinated diphenyl."[8]
GE's F.R. Kaimer described the HUMAN reaction of GE executives to the disfigurement and pain of GE workers exposed to PCBs: "[W]e had 50 other men in very bad condition as far as the acne was concerned. The first reaction that several of our executives had was to throw it out — get it out of our plant. They didn't want anything like that for treating wire. But that was easily said but not so easily done. We might just as well have thrown our business to the four winds and said, 'We'll close up,' because there was no substitute and there is none today in spite of all the efforts we have made through our own research laboratories to find one."[8] And so GE executives--contrary to their personal ethics — reached a business decision to continue using PCBs.
How we got here, Part Two:
Who Will Take Responsibility for PCBs?
The story of PCBs is a morality play for our time.
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) were discovered during the 19th century, when petroleum was still more of a curiosity than a recognized foundation for the world's most powerful civilization. As the automobile came into wider use during this century (Henry Ford invented the assembly line around 1910), the demand for gasoline grew.
As gasoline was extracted from crude oil, great quantities of other chemicals, like benzene, were left over. Chemists started playing around with these chemicals, to see if something useful could be made from smelly by-products, like benzene.
If you heat benzene under the right conditions, you can glue two benzene rings together, creating diphenyl. If you then expose the diphenyl to chlorine gas under the right conditions, you can create chlorinated diphenyls, or biphenyls as we call them today. Adding more or less chlorine gives compounds with differing properties, and thus PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, all 75 of them) came into being. They aren't soluble in water, they don't burn, the don't conduct electricity, they do not degrade during use, and they conduct heat very well — viola! An excellent candidate for a variety of uses in the burgeoning fields of electric power equipment and electronics.
By 1914 enough PCBs had already escaped into the environment to leave measurable amounts in the feathers of birds held in museums today. [1]
By the mid-1930s, as we saw earlier (RHWN #327) Monsanto was producing PCBs commercially and PCBs had created a public health problem sufficient in size to attract academic researchers, the U.S. Public Health Service, and several large industrial producers and users of PCBs.
In 1936 a senior official with the U.S., Public Health Service described a wife and child, both of whom had developed chloracne, a combination of blackheads and "pustules," merely from contact with a worker's clothes. The same official wrote, "In addition to these skin lesions, symptoms of systemic poisoning have occurred among workers inhaling these fumes." [2]
By 1947, E.C. Barnes of Westinghouse's medical department wrote, in an internal company memo, that long-term exposure to PCB fumes "may produce internal bodily injury which may be disabling or could be fatal." [3]
By 1959, the assistant director of Monsanto's Medical Department would write to the Administrator of Industrial Hygiene at Westinghouse saying, "...sufficient exposure, whether by inhalation of vapors or skin contact, can result in chloracne which I think we must assume could be an indication of a more systemic injury if the exposure were allowed to continue." [4]
In 1968, when 1300 residents of Kyushu, Japan, fell ill after eating rice contaminated with PCBs, the world's public health establishment woke up from a long sleep and began to examine PCBs, which by this time were everywhere.
In late 1971, a group of Westinghouse staff met to discuss PCBs and they noted that PCBs concentrate in the food chain. A memo summarizing the meeting said, "It was generally concluded that... there is sufficient evidence that pcbs can be deleterious to the health of animal and human life and that the risks of ignoring the evidence that does exist was [sic] inappropriate for Westinghouse." [5] Yet the 1971 memo recommended continued use of PCBs.
Nearly 20 years later, in the late 1980s, researchers began to find that workers exposed to PCBs were dying of skin cancer and, perhaps, of brain cancer. Westinghouse and Monsanto maintain that they always informed their workers completely about the hazards of PCBs, but during the 1990s, workers have begun to sue for damages, saying the companies misled them.
Smoking Gun Documents
Recently in a court in Travis County, Texas, Westinghouse released a 22-page memo that bears no date, but which company officials say was written by a Westinghouse staff lawyer in 1987 or 1988. [6] In the memo, the Westinghouse lawyer describes extensive paper and microfilm records held by the Westinghouse Industrial Hygiene Department: "The majority of the documents in Industrial Hygiene's files are potential 'smoking gun' documents," the memo says.
The memo goes on, "The files are filled with documentation which critiques and criticizes, from an industrial hygiene perspective, Westinghouse manufacturing and non-manufacturing operations. This documentation often times points out deficiencies in Westinghouse operations and suggests recommendations to correct these deficiencies. Industrial Hygiene's files contain information which details the various chemical substances used at Westinghouse sites over the years and often times the inadequacies in Westinghouse's use and handling of the substances. The files contain many years of employee test results, some of them unfavorable," the memo says. [7]
The memo says that Westinghouse executives must ask certain questions before deciding to keep or destroy the smoking gun records. The first question is, "What are the chances of litigation? Is it pending or imminent?" The second question is, "In the case of litigation, which party would have the burden of proof?"
The memo then says, "We recommend that all such files generated prior to 1974 be discarded.... In our opinion, the risks of keeping these files on the whole substantially exceed the advantages of maintaining the records...."
Westinghouse officials deny that the memo was acted upon. They say they still have all the company's files intact. However, in a lawsuit against Westinghouse by Nevada Power and Light (NP&L), Westinghouse did not produce documents, such as correspondence between Westinghouse and Monsanto, requested by NP&L in a "discovery" proceeding. Monsanto, on the other hand, did produce correspondence with Westinghouse officials. [4] NP&L is suing Westinghouse, GE and Monsanto for $48.5 million in compensatory damages for costs the utility says it incurred because of PCBs in electric power equipment.
Furthermore, in sworn testimony in the NP&L case, three Westinghouse employees or former employees described how files that they maintained about PCBs were taken from them by members of Westinghouse legal staff in the 1980s and never returned to them.
It is not clear why Westinghouse handed over the "smoking gun" memo to opposing counsel in the Texas suit. [Attorney Robert Straub, who was prsent at the document production, told me that the boxes given to the plaintiff’s team by Westinghouse contained many copies of the 22-page plan to shred the evidence. Someone inside Westinghouse was making sure they did not miss it.]
In any case, Westinghouse attorneys tried to have the document declared "privileged" so that it would remain under wraps. On February 9, 1993, Texas Judge Paul R. Davis ruled against Westinghouse, saying the memo "falls within the crime/fraud exemption to privileged documents" under Texas law because, the Judge said, the memo was "prepared, and describe[s] a plan, to commit fraud on the courts of this nation." Westinghouse denies fraudulent intention, but destroying documents that might be needed in foreseeable litigation is forbidden under U.S. law.
Westinghouse will have many opportunities to redeem its good name in the next few years. If company officials still have all their company records dating back to the 1930s, they will be able to produce relevant documents during "discovery" proceedings in dozens of lawsuits now impending or already filed. More than a thousand individuals have already filed lawsuits against Westinghouse, seeking compensation for alleged damages from workplace exposures.
During this '90s, the PCB morality play will move through the courts, where Chapter 11 bankruptcy may be the only way out for the purveyors of PCBs.
Some may see in this history the malevolent machinations of corporate criminals. But others may find in this story well-meaning individuals trapped in circumstances they believe forced them to make choices that they, as individuals, could never condone.
In RHWN #327 we heard General Electric's F.R. Kaimer describe the HUMAN reaction of GE executives to the disfigurement and pain of GE workers exposed to PCBs: "[W]e had 50 other men in very bad condition as far as the acne was concerned. The first reaction that several of our executives had was to throw it out--get it out of our plant. They didn't want anything like that for treating wire. But that was easily said but not so easily done. We might just as well have thrown our business to the four winds and said, 'We'll close up,' because there was no substitute and there is none today in spite of all the efforts we have made through our own research laboratories to find one." [7]
In the end, it does not matter what motivated the actors in our PCB story. Whether they were motivated by good or evil, the necessary remedy is the same.
As a society, and as a species, we cannot survive the launching of many more families of chemicals like PCBs or CFCs. Yet the corporate form of organization shields those who launch such chemicals, preventing them AS INDIVIDUALS from feeling the consequences of their actions. The way out of this thicket is to give back liability to all individuals, removing the corporate shield that prevents individuals from feeling the consequences of their own actions. Through reform of the corporate charter, we can return to everyone their essential humanness, their responsibility for their own choices in their own lives.
Footnotes to Part One
[1] Robert Risebrough and Virginia Brodine, "More Letters in the Wind," in Sheldon Novick and Dorothy Cottrell, editors, OUR WORLD IN PERIL: AN ENVIRONMENT REVIEW (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1971), pgs. 243-255.
[2] Soren Jensen, "Report of a New Chemical Hazard," NEW SCIENTIST Vol. 32 (1966), pg. 612.
[3] Kristin Bryan Thomas and Theo Colborn, "Organochlorine Endocrine Disruptors in Human Tissue," in Theo Colborn and Coralie Clement, editors, CHEMICALLY-INDUCED ALTERATIONS IN SEXUAL AND FUNCTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE WILDLIFE/HUMAN CONNECTION [Advances in Modern Environmental Toxicology Vol. XXI] (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Scientific Publishing Co., [1992).] pgs. 342-343.
[4] See, for example, Robert L. DeLong and others, "Premature Births in California Sea Lions: Association With High Organochlorine Pollutant Residue Levels," SCIENCE Vol. 181 (Sept. 21, 1973), pgs. 1168-1170; and Peter J. H. Reijnders, "Reproductive failure in common seals feeding on fish from polluted coastal waters," NATURE Vol. 304 (Dec. 4, 1986), pgs. [456-457.]456-457.
[5] Shinsuke Tanabe, "PCB Problems in the Future: Foresight from Current Knowledge," ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION Vol. 50 (1988), pgs. 5-28.
[6] Kristin Bryan Thomas and Theo Colborn, "Organochlorine Endocrine Disruptors in Human Tissue," in Theo Colborn and Coralie Clement, editors, CHEMICALLY-INDUCED ALTERATIONS IN SEXUAL AND FUNCTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE WILDLIFE/HUMAN CONNECTION [Advances in Modern Environmental Toxicology Vol. XXI] (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Scientific Publishing Co., [1992).] pgs. 365-394. For the comparison of U.S. breast-fed infants' intake vs. World health Organization's standard for adults, see pg. 385.
[7] Hugh A. Tilson and others, "Polychlorinated Biphenyls and the Developing Nervous System: Cross-Species Comparisons," NEUROTOXICOLOGY AND TERATOLOGY Vol. 12 (1990), pgs. 239-248.
[8] Cecil K. Drinker and others, "The Problem of Possible Systemic Effects From Certain Chlorinated Hydrocarbons," THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE AND TOXICOLOGY Vol. 19 (September, 1937), pgs. 283-311. Thanks to Bridget Barclay of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater for sending us this revealing article. Ms. Barclay and her colleagues at Hudson Clearwater have worked tirelessly for years to force a sensible cleanup of PCBs that GE dumped, contaminating the length of the Hudson River; Hudson Clearwater can be reached in Poughkeepsie at (914) 454-7673.
Descriptor terms: pcbs; ge; chlorine; sandford brown; halowax corp; usphs; westinghouse; electricity; monsanto; wildlife; fish; mo; landfills; oceans; swan corp;
Footnotes to Part Two
[1] Robert Risebrough and Virginia Brodine, "More Letters in the Wind," in Sheldon Novick and Dorothy Cottrell, editors, OUR WORLD IN PERIL: AN ENVIRONMENT REVIEW (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1971), pgs. 243-255.
[2] E.C. Barnes quoted in Michael Schroeder, "Did Westinghouse Keep Mum on PCBs?" BUSINESS WEEK August 12, 1991, pgs. 68-70.
[3] Letter from Elmer P. Wheeler of Monsanto, to H. Wilbur Speicher of Westinghouse, October 23, 1959.
[4] Memo from G.W. Wiener, Research Director, Power Systems, Westinghouse, titled "Minutes of pcb status," dated December 28, 1971.
[5] Stuart Mieher, "Westinghouse Lawyer Urged in '88 Note That Toxic-Safety Records Be Destroyed." WALL STREET JOURNAL February 26, 1993, pg. A-4.
[6] Undated "smoking gun" memo by Westinghouse attorney Jeffrey Bair and C.W. Bickerstaff, then Manager of Corporate Industrial Hygiene for Westinghouse.
[7] Cecil K. Drinker and others, "The Problem of Possible Systemic Effects From Certain Chlorinated Hydrocarbons," THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE AND TOXICOLOGY Vol. 19 (September, 1937), pgs. 283-311.
Descriptor terms: pcbs; polychlorinated biphenyls; benzene; monsanto; u.s. public health service; westinghouse; chloracne; kyushu; japan; tx; nevada power & light; np&l; smoking gun memo; fraud; judge paul r. davis; general electric; f.r. kaimer; petroleum; chlorinated hydrocarbons;
We're surrounded by this stuff- at least this event is bringing that awareness to the forefront.
Great report.
Here's one for your archives:
https://www.justice.gov/enrd/us-v-bliss