Administration Quietly Drops PCB Import Ban

Sixteen years after the United States closed its borders to the highly toxic PCB compounds, the Clinton administration reversed course and has announced without fanfare that the chemicals will be allowed back into the country for incineration.

Environmental Protection Agency officials said Wednesday that they decided to allow private incinerator operators to import the chemicals for destruction because that is safer than allowing stockpiles to fester in Canada, Mexico and other countries.

But environmentalists said they fear that the import ban was dropped under congressional pressure as the five commercial U.S. incinerators search for a steady foreign stream of PCBs to destroy. Much of the easily destroyed liquid form of the chemicals is disappearing from the United States.

The new rule was published in the Federal Register on Monday and took effect immediately. It was first proposed in late 1994 but drew little if any attention from environmentalists.

PCBs--short for polychlorinated biphenyls--were developed as industrial lubricants, often for use in large electrical transformers. Their use in new equipment was banned nearly two decades ago after they were linked to cancer.

When burned, PCBs produce dioxin, which is linked to cancer, brain damage, reproductive disorders and--in children--developmental problems. Incinerators, despite precautions, give off minute quantities that enter the food chain through meat, dairy products and fish.

“It’s hard to imagine a chemical much worse than PCBs, except when you burn them and get dioxin and dibenzofurans, a highly toxic compound similar to dioxin,” said Al Meyerhoff of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental group.

Meanwhile, in another decision involving air quality, EPA Administrator Carol Browner announced Wednesday that the agency has toughened rules governing toxic emissions from the burning of hazardous wastes in cement kilns and incinerators to cut dioxin emissions by 98%, cadmium emissions by 95% and mercury emissions by 80%.

Permission to import PCBs had been sought since 1990 by an Ohio company, S.D. Myers Inc., whose president, Dana Myers, said the stream of chemicals for his incinerator was running out.

“We fought and fought and fought for an exemption” from the import ban, he said, meeting repeated refusals from the EPA to permit him to import the chemical from Canada. Last year, with its work rolls shrinking, the company resubmitted its proposal, gaining the support of Rep. Thomas C. Sawyer (D-Ohio).

With the new rule, Myers said, “they gave us more than we asked for.”

“This is a perfect example of when politics overrules years of scientific investigation,” said Theo Colborn, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund and author of “Our Stolen Future,” a new book about the far-reaching impacts of such chemicals on the human body and the environment.

Tony Baney, an EPA official involved in the decision, said the imports were banned in 1980 to pressure Canada to develop its own disposal facility at a time when the United States had one incinerator and two landfills accepting PCBs.

He said that while the stockpile of material contaminated with PCBs in Canada and Mexico may total 500 million pounds, it is unlikely that such an amount would be shipped to the U.S. incinerators, located in Kansas, Texas, Utah and Ohio.