General Electric, polychlorinated biphenyls, and the Hudson River.

The General Electric superfraud:  Why the Hudson River will never run clean by David Gargill.

PCBs are synthetic oils made up of one to ten chlorine atoms bound to a biphenyl ring. The varieties used along the Hudson were amber in color, with the viscosity of maple syrup, but slipperier. The oils were long hailed as miraculous for allowing electricity to flow without altering the charge or being altered themselves, and for their non-flammability and resilience. Chemical anthropologists will be finding them thousands of years from now, assuming we’re still around. Their toxicity was well established by the 1930s, and no safe level of exposure has been set for cancer or non-cancer health risks; all that’s known is, more is worse. This is unfortunate, because until they were outlawed in 1977, PCBs were of use nearly everywhere electricity could be found, especially in wire, transformers, and capacitors. The oils were therefore ubiquitous, effective in preventing electrical fires and other disruptions, enabling much of modern life’s ease, particularly the portion abetted by General Electric.