In 1992, General Electric Company and the American Forest and Paper Association (a trade group representing the paper industry), joined forces to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block new PCB water quality criteria designed to protect human health, on the grounds that the numbers were too strict. 

The EPA settled with them and agreed to suspend the proposed criteria until EPA could reassess PCB cancer effects. In 1998, EPA weakened the proposed standard (from a cancer slope factor of 7.7 per mg/kg-d avg. lifetime exposure, down to .07 to 2.0, depending on types of PCBs).

The corporate action accomplished several purposes:

1. PCB rules were delayed at least 6 years, possibly more. Industries across the country were allowed to continue dumping PCBs into public waterways in the meantime. (Though Wisconsin set PCB criteria in 1989.)

2. The industries continued a long-effective pattern of intimidating government agencies, making the government "litigation shy"and unwilling to take any action that might provoke legal complications. This "shyness" is one reason it takes so long for the government to address serious toxicity problems in our society.

3. Numerous private and class action lawsuits were underway during this timeframe, with citizens across the country suing companies for health and property damages from PCBs. The EPA’s waffling on human health risks gave strength to industry legal arguments.

4. PCBs are persistent and accumulate in sediments and wildlife downstream from the discharge point, yet the criteria are designed to address only PCBs suspended in the water column for a relatively short time. On the Fox River, it’s as if the river were an infinitely long teflon tube --- as if nothing sticks to the side and it ends nowhere. We all know this is untrue. The PCBs do end up and accumulate in Green Bay and Lake Michigan.

5. Regardless of the final number, the PCB criteria fly in the face of international efforts to ban PCB releases. One example would be the United Nation’s Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Treaty proposal. Another is the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between Canada and the U.S. which pledged years ago to push for Zero Discharge of persistent toxins like PCBs.