Bummer: according to the Tacoma, WA News Tribune, Puget Sound salmon are contaminated with especially high levels of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls.
The important thing to remember about this story is that PCBs haven’t been manufactured in the U.S. for nearly three decades; they were banned in 1977. But the compounds are perniciously long lived in the environment, and they continue to leak from old and abandoned equipment. Getting rid of them is going to be a matter of many decades, and, possibly, billions of dollars to clean up contamination hotspots—such as the old industrial zones surrounding the Sound.
It really makes me wish that we’d been more careful the first time around—if you don’t make a mess in the first place, you don’t have to worry about cleaning it up.
