Why doesn’t the polluter pay? PCBs in Wales

PCBs are the original “forever chemical”. They are potent neurotoxins, recognised by the UK government research agency CEFAS as impacting the reproduction and navigation of migratory fish like salmon. They have recently been found in bottlenose dolphins in West Wales.

They are heavy, so sink to the beds of rivers and estuaries, and don’t usually show up in the midwater testing routinely used by regulators. They are persistent and dangerous. 50 years on from their production, they are still in UK ecosystems and continuing to leak out of the toxic dump sites they were offloaded into in conventional and possibly unconventional ways, primarily in barrels which are now rusting and leaking.

PCBs get washed out of dump sites every winter, such as those in the Ty Llwyd and Maendy quarries in South Wales, into river sediment. They are eaten by shrimps, then the shrimps are eaten by fish, and bioaccumulation is underway. As shown in the Toxic Docs archive, Monsanto scientists specify that as little as two parts per billion affect shrimps. Monsanto scientists knew it 50 years ago, including what levels stop a fish population being able to reproduce sustainably. Fish stocks in the rivers Ely and Taff have required supplementation. Natural Resources Wales (NRW) stocked extra fish in the contaminated environment below Brofiscin quarry.

And now the Green Party has identified that an old landfill in Telford, Shropshire may be leaking into the Unesco World Heritage Site of Ironbridge Gorge, a birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Toxic waste was dumped there by the chemical manufacturer Monsanto. It has been reported that “Monsanto has racked up billions in liability for pollution in the United States but has never paid out any compensation in the UK, despite records showing it produced tens of thousands of tonnes of chemical waste here which were then dumped in unregulated landfills across England and Wales.”

PCBs on the Welsh border

Along the Welsh border, from Ruabon down to Newport, there is a strip of PCB production and disposal sites, which are only now receiving full public attention. They have been highlighted before by brave characters like the 1970s MP Brynmor John and the selfless National Farmers’ Union scientist Douglas Gowan. Both paid a price for their pioneering work, just as I am now doing. Regulators label me as a “persistent complainant”, seemingly in order to avoid having to give straight answers to straight questions.

Persistence is surely a virtue, not a vice, in a scientific researcher. And I initially, deliberately, did not formally launch a complaint. I just said which answers didn’t match the questions, and called out official obfuscation. What a catch-22, or rather a tangled web, when that is labelled a reason not to reply further.

The main sites were mapped by the Press Association earlier this year. Another survey several years ago found that many lie beneath school property. Yet few of these sites are recognised as contaminated land by our purported regulatory experts, the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales. The wrong kind of testing is held up purporting to show that there isn’t a problem, as in the Severn Estuary Special Area of Conservation and on the lower Welsh Dee below the former Ruabon Monsanto factory.

Or suitable testing is simply not done, and the absence of significant watercourse results is brazenly said to be the reason for non-classification, as at Newport Council and Rhondda Council. The statutory guidance to local councils has been written in a way which undermines the excellent primary legislation of the Environmental Protection Act Part 2A, classifying over half of the length of UK watercourses away from being defined as ‘receptors’.

Look at the history of Brofiscin Quarry, for example. Did the Environment Agency (EA) obstruct the course of justice? Did anyone manage to get Baroness Young to speak about the legacy of her time in charge of the Environment Agency during Tony Blair’s premiership? Did she have the autonomy to set toxic chemical policy at the EA, or was she following a transatlantic-friendly top-level political steer? The villagers of polluted Ynysddu still need and deserve answers.

I have been researching Monsanto hazardous chemical dump sites in the UK in my spare time intensively over the last five years. I’ve encountered so many varieties of official attempts to block enquiries and evade giving straight answers that I’ve mapped the range of strategies employed by each council, regulator, and government. My lungs are affected from time spent in toxic vapour emanating from the soil, and my nose has become hyper-sensitised to varieties of phenolic and toluene mixed smells. I’ve documented 14 affected rivers and ten estuaries. And that’s just an amateur working late evenings and early mornings before parishioners awake.

Hazardous wastes of time

The chemicals I’ve been studying include pentachlorophenol, benzoanthracene, chrysene, pyrene, methylphenol, diethylphthalate, phenanthrene, 4 nitroaniline, xylene, fluoranthene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), paranitrochlorobenzene (PNCB), trichlorophenols … in all a list of about 60 different chemicals. Carcinogenic, mutagenic, highly toxic to aquatic life, persistent, affecting livers and kidneys, and so on. Many originated at the Monsanto factories at Ruabon and Newport. The Newport site was once the largest manufacturer of PCBs in Europe.

PCB contamination has been scientifically proven from carcass analysis in the UK to have reached killer whales, porpoises, dolphins, otters, trout, flatfish, herons, dippers, and gannets. We await the Welsh Government testing of the chemicals in the stomach of a fox found this year beside the toxic flow below Ty Llwyd. “Ty Llwyd quarry, on the banks of the valleys above the picturesque town of Ynysddu, is leaking deadly chemicals from the site formally used as a dumping ground of toxic waste by chemical manufacturer Monsanto – now under the management of Caerphilly Council.” It could be years before proper action is taken.

The former Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) was so worried about PCB damage to wildlife that it set up a major secret research programme in around 1970. I’ve seen the minutes of several of their meetings, after trawling through over 5000 documents in a Columbia University archive to find them. The archive also lists a secretive payment by Monsanto to Islwyn District Council regarding Ty Llwyd, which Caerphilly Council refuses to discuss with me.

MAFF involved official research stations at Burnham-on-Crouch, Lowestoft, and several Scottish locations. Top US Monsanto scientists flew in at the height of an international outcry, held meetings in London, and were given tours of UK and other European PCB locations. I have a full list of the companies in UK towns and cities that received PCB for their factories and where Monsanto was taken, but am keeping that to myself for now.

There are multiple high PCB readings around the city of Wrexham on NRW file, seemingly officially ignored. The Newport factory site is now controlled by Eastman with liability vehicle Solutia involvement (it’s all a bit convoluted, like how toxic trucker Redland Rurle became Cleanaway became Veolia). The Newport PCB site comes complete with a chemical waste disposal pit. NRW claims there has been no testing for PCBs in sediment or wildlife in the entire River Usk, including where it runs a few hundred yards from the factory and where there are tidal drains. Really? The Welsh government report for the M4 bridge explicitly found “elevated levels”of PCBs in sediment less than a mile upstream.

Two factories which used PCBs for carbonless copier paper manufacture particularly stand out: Borehamwood on the Colne tributary of the Thames, and Treforest on the Taff above Cardiff. Direct discharge of PCB effluent into both rivers was recorded, again according to the Toxic Docs Archive. Monsanto’s UK scientific chief did a “mass balance” of “aroclor” showing tons of contaminated effluent discharged into UK rivers. (Aroclor is a particularly nasty mix of PCBs, internationally reviled as a persistent pollutant). Cardiff in particular has worrying results of bioaccumulated PCBs in eels in the docks area and in the mussels just outside the estuary.

A forgotten legacy

Natural Resources Wales is refusing to engage with my team about the results of our research. Isn’t it the job of a regulator to liaise constructively with experts and civil society about river pollution, instead of condemning persistence and continuing, in the words of The Ecologist, which did the original exposes, to “shoot the messenger”?

We organised a public meeting in one affected location, Ynysddu village in the Caerphilly Council area, through which toxic overflow regularly and predictably runs across the high street and into the river each winter. We discussed their contaminated sites:

Ty Llwyd chemical drum and toxic tanker offload disposal site, on the side of a very steep hill above the village and river.
Penrhos, where 140,000 tons of contaminated soil was removed to nearby Trecatti. Yet the stream in the middle of Caerphilly has four ugly yellow-orange smears coming from under the massive ‘protective barrier’ straight into the main stream flow, completely sediment-untested near the leaking chemical source, directly below a new housing estate above similarly untested Castle Lake.
Ness Tar Plant, where multiple contaminant readings were literally recorded as “off the scale”, a scared scientist told me candidly.
Porset Brook, where PCB-contaminated sediment sits in a housing estate near where children play in a stream.

Despite records going back to 1991 highlighting the overflow and environmental pollution problem, NRW and Caerphilly Council boycotted the citizens’s meeting, predictably. Democratic accountability through looking concerned citizens in the eye in a public forum is apparently too painful. We had been offered a private meeting, for which people had to surrender their emails and seemingly even addresses as a condition of entry. Yet we were told it must be unminuted and that we weren’t allowed to record proceedings.

So we organised our own meeting instead, with a Senedd member there, and representatives for other Senedd members to achieve a party balance. Welsh Labour chose not to attend. We are organising more public events in coming months, one at Cefn Mawr near Llangollen and Wrexham, and one in England at a location to be announced.

Where are we going with all this? A very kind London specialist law firm has agreed to assist us. We have delineated three potential legal offences and started to analyse the lack of accountability among original polluter companies. A brief is being prepared for counsel, hopefully also to be arranged pro bono. We will roll out, through publicity and activity, a national accountability programme for the Monsanto chemical dump sites, starting in South Wales but including North Wales, Cumbria, Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, and outside the M25 belt.

The ‘polluter pays’ is the principle that those who produce pollution should bear the costs of managing it to prevent harm to human health or the environment: “For instance, a factory that produces a potentially poisonous substance as a by-product of its activities is usually held responsible for its safe disposal. The polluter pays principle is part of a set of broader principles to guide sustainable development worldwide (formally known as the 1992 Rio Declaration).” Yet the United Nations Environment Programme calls the PCB problem “a forgotten legacy”, and there has been little justice, accountability, or clean-up in the UK.

How can you help? We have started a crowdfunding campaign to create a fighting fund for toxic waste watercourse pollution accountability and remediation. How much better would it be if the regulators decided that accountability and remediation are better than denial and actually started to liaise constructively? But no: a letter issued by NRW to Caerphilly Borough Council on June 20 accused it of environmental offences regarding Ty Llywd quarry. So the Welsh Government, Caerphilly Council, and NRW held a secret meeting about it via Teams on Tuesday.

If you can help, any contributions to Monsanto’s Toxic Legacy: righting the wrongs 50 years on would be much appreciated.

Given right of reply, Nadia De Longhi, Head of Regulation and Permitting at Natural Resources Wales said: “Wales’ strong industrial past has left behind a legacy of historic contaminated land which, without proper management and controls in place, could pose risks to human health, the environment and wildlife. NRW’s role as a regulator means that we monitor and review permitted sites, ensuring operators comply with their environmental permits and provide technical guidance and advice to make sure such sites do not become a pollution risk in the future. Where the rules are broken, we take enforcement action that is proportionate and necessary.”

“For historical sites that are not regulated by NRW, local authorities are required by law as principal regulators to identify potential contaminated land in their areas and take appropriate action. Where local authorities identify land which may be contaminated by legacy activities, we work closely with them to monitor and review the sites to ensure that any risks to people, wildlife and the environment are minimised. Where land is determined as contaminated land, local authorities will need to ensure it is remediated to an acceptable standard. In certain circumstances, contaminated land may be designated as a special site by a local authority. In this situation, NRW will take on responsibility and make sure it is investigated. While the impacts of Wales’ industrial past on the environment has reduced significantly over the years due to tighter controls, we recognise that there is more work to do. NRW is committed to working with the relevant authorities to tackle this issue and to protect the environment, local communities, and wildlife from the impacts of this legacy.”

Update, 10 July 2023 regarding Ty Llwyd quarry. Jon Goldsworthy, Operations Manager for Natural Resources Wales said: “Our investigation into the pollution incident that occurred in January this year at Ty Llwyd quarry, Caerphilly has now been completed. We have issued Caerphilly Country Borough Council (CCBC) with a warning as our enforcement response for an unauthorised discharge activity under the Environmental Permitting Regulations 2016. This is based on the proportionality of the offence committed and the ongoing commitment CCBC are making in ensuring future discharges do not occur. We will also be recharging CCBC for our costs of responding to and investigating the incident under the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle. It is likely that CCBC will require a permit to discharge to water or ground and they have appointed consultants to advise them of the necessary actions to control any further pollution from this site. We understand that CCBC are awaiting these proposals from their consultants. Once the proposals are available and actions are agreed, timescales will be imposed. Failure to abide by the agreed milestones may result in additional enforcement action. We will continue to work closely with CCBC to provide technical advice and guidance to tackle this issue and protect the environment, local communities and wildlife from the impacts of this legacy.”