pcbs

The next time you go out for seafood, you might want to ask where the tuna was caught. According to new research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, the levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the muscle tissue of yellowfin tuna caught in the more industrialized areas […]

Washington could have an ace up its sleeve in its major lawsuit against Monsanto over PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) contamination throughout the state. Before switching operations to agriculture, Monsanto was the primary manufacturer of PCBs, which was used for paints, electrical equipment and other products, from 1935 until 1977. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned […]

The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy released a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents Wednesday stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available here. Together, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked […]

This past May, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt raised some eyebrows when he issued a memorandum insisting he be personally involved in decisions regarding Superfund cleanups that cost $50 million or more. Now we might know why he made that move. As noted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), one of […]

By Carey Wedler The Guardian reported last Tuesday that Lulu, the full-grown whale who died, “was a member of the UK’s last resident pod and a postmortem also showed she had never produced a calf. The pollutants, called PCBs, are known to cause infertility and these latest findings add to strong evidence that the pod […]

The tragic story of Lulu, a beloved orca found dead and entangled in fishing gear last year, has taken a turn for the worse. Experts with the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme found the killer whale had “shocking levels of PCBs,” or polychlorinated biphenyls, a banned but highly pervasive toxic chemical. “The levels of PCB […]

Monsanto may be looking forward to turning a new leaf with its potential $66 billion mega-merger with Bayer AG, but the agrochemical giant just can’t shake its notorious past as the primary manufacturer of highly toxic and banned substances called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that were once used for paints, electrical equipment and other products. […]

English researchers have discovered an alarming amount of toxic pollution in the bodies of amphipods living in the deep sea trenches of the Pacific Ocean. The research team from Newcastle University, the James Hutton Institute and the University of Aberdeen caught and tested small crustaceans in the Mariana and Kermadec trenches, which reach about 30,000 […]