Word: pcbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...repairman from New York's Long Island Lighting Co. was trying to fix a faulty home-heating system when he found a mysterious oily sludge in the natural-gas pipe connected to the house. LILCO soon learned that the substance contained dangerous concentrations of PCBs, a class of highly toxic industrial chemicals. That startling discovery in 1981 eventually led the Environmental Protection Agency to launch a major investigation of Texas Eastern, the Houston-based firm that supplied the gas to LILCO. Last week, in the largest settlement of an EPA case in history, Texas Eastern (1986 revenues: $4.1 billion) agreed...
Unfortunately, the PCB contamination at Texas Eastern is not an isolated case. Starting in the 1930s -- decades before it was discovered that minute concentrations of PCBs can cause cancer in laboratory animals -- the chemicals were widely used in electrical equipment as a flame retardant to reduce the risk of fires and explosions. Texas Eastern, for example, long ago put PCBs into the compressors that drive natural gas through the company's pipelines, and the stubborn residues of the chemicals are still present. The firm is only one of 14 pipeline companies the EPA has been investigating for PCB leakage. Less...
...threat is, partly because an increase in the incidence of ill effects caused by the chemicals might take a ^ long time to show up. As a precaution, the Government has been moving to mop up the PCB mess. In 1979 Congress banned the production, sale and distribution of PCBs. Companies were permitted to keep using equipment that already contained the chemicals, as long as the machinery was carefully sealed. As the equipment wears out, owners must deposit it at federally approved toxic-waste disposal sites...
...ramshackle slums. On the edges of town, such classic polluters as food-processing and chemical plants dump ! organic wastes, pesticides, solvents and other chemicals into slime-filled ditches that drain into the river. About 100 toxic substances, including mercury and such known or suspected cancer-causing agents as PCBs, toxaphene and benzene have been identified at the border sampling site...
Perhaps the most innovative technology involves the use of bacteria. A small Texas company called Detox Industries has developed microbes that eat PCBs, creosote and pentachlorophenol. Microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty of the University of Illinois in Chicago has used a patented "molecular breeding" process to achieve the evolution of a bug that can convert the chief ingredient of the herbicide Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, into carbon dioxide and chloride. In laboratory tests, his bacteria are so dependent upon the chemical that once they have consumed whatever is available they...