GE Pays Up

When a factory has been dumping provably toxic pollutants into a waterway, it can usually settle the case by simply agreeing to stop. Last week General Electric went a long step further: it agreed to help pay for a cleanup.

For years GE had routinely flushed long-lived polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the upper Hudson River from its plants at Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, N.Y. These compounds are widely used in the manufacture of electrical equipment, but have been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals and illnesses in plant workers. They would probably even harm people who eat fish that have fed on algae heavily contaminated by PCBS. Last year New York State officials started legal action to make GE stop the discharges, but they were fearful that the action would force the company to shut down the plants, wiping out jobs. For its part, GE would not admit any legal guilt; it pointed out that it had a federal permit to dump the chemicals into the river.

After months of haggling with the state and environmentalists, the company last week agreed to an innovative settlement. GE still accepts no legal blame, but will nonetheless reduce its discharge of PCBS to tiny quantities next year by using substitute chemicals, and build a $3.5 million treatment facility to prevent other pollutants from entering the Hudson. Further, it will pay $3 million toward restoring the purity of the Hudson's waters--a sum to be matched by the state--plus another $1 million to find ways to end the PCB problem. The precedent may be more important than the dollar amounts: never before has a company accepted so much responsibility for cleaning up the mess it has caused.

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