In the News

Massachusetts federal lawmakers are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to push General Electric to finish cleaning the polluted parts of the Housatonic River and cart the toxic waste out of the state.

The EPA and GE, which is now headquartered in Boston, agree that the river must be cleaned up but have clashed over where to put the toxic waste. 

GE has pushed for the material, which has to be dredged from the riverbed, to be located in nearby landfills, arguing that moving it out of state would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But the EPA and state officials have said it should be shipped off-site to licensed disposal facilities, and one doesn't exist in Massachusetts.

"To allow local disposal of GE's toxic waste scraped from the riverbed would be incompatible with Massachusetts state law and a complete disregard of the affected Massachusetts communities who have been plagued with this corporate pollution for far too long," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ed Markey, and Congressman Richard Neal wrote in a Feb. 8 letter to the EPA's administrator, Scott Pruitt.

"This project is about protecting the health of our families that deserve to be able to fish, hike, and play alongside the river and its banks," they added.

GE once had a plant in Pittsfield, which between the 1930s and 1970s spilled tons of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Housatonic. PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979 due to the possibility of the material being a cancer-causing agent.

According to the lawmakers' letter, up to 600,000 pounds of PCBs could still be in the Housatonic.

The EPA has argued, through a plan proposed three years ago, that the majority of the cleanup should focus on 11 miles of the river that run through the city of Pittsfield and the towns of Lee and Lenox.

But the federal Environmental Appeals Board recently told the EPA that the agency should review requirements for the location of the toxic waste disposal.

"We urge the EPA to insist that GE be a responsible corporate neighbor by cleaning the Housatonic River," the federal lawmakers wrote in their letter. "In doing so, the EPA should respect existing Massachusetts laws regarding toxic waste disposal, hear and respect the concerned voices of Western Massachusetts, and require that the carcinogenic PCBs be deposited in a federally licensed out-of-state disposal site."