THE GLOBAL CITIZEN: Three Companies Say 'Oops' in Different Ways

Three stories have hit the news lately concerning three corporations that have done -- or may have done -- serious environmental harm. They are coping with the situation in very different ways. Taken together, the stories suggest an odd combination of hope and cynicism. There are signs of honesty, good will, real learning. But the damage is great, and the learning is slow.

Story Number One is the latest development in a decades-long saga involving General Electric. In the 1940s two GE capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, New York, started using the new chemicals called PCBs and spilling them lavishly into the Hudson River. Thirty years later the nation adopted a Clean Water Act, and PCBs were found to be bad news. They last almost forever in the environment, they concentrate in animal and human tissue, they are linked with cancer and reproductive failure.

By the time PCBs had been fully indicted, millions of pounds of them had sunk into the mud of the Hudson for 200 miles downstream from the GE plants. There followed a 25 year battle about how the river should be cleaned up and who should pay for it. GE fought in the way we have unfortunately come to expect from corporations. Denial, obfuscation, leaning upon politicians, threatening to pull 55,000 jobs out of the state if the company were held liable.

Now the EPA has ordered PCB-laced mud to be dredged out of the Hudson at a cost to GE of a billion or so dollars. GE is objecting, saying the river has safely covered over the contaminated sediment. The company has a point. Disturbing the mud could churn up more damage than leaving it. Once dredged it would still have to be put somewhere. But EPA has a point too. A storm or flood could stir up old sediment, and meanwhile it slowly percolates down to the sea.

The problem for GE is that, though it may or may not be credible now, its past behavior has destroyed its credibility in this matter. Negative legacies can last a long time.

So here's a better story. On May 11 William C. Ford, chairman of the Ford Motor Company (and great-grandson of founder Henry Ford) told his stockholders that sports utility vehicles are gross polluters and dangerous on the road. Ford, of course, makes the biggest road hog of all, the Excursion, which weighs twice as much as a Grand Cherokee and gets 10 miles to the gallon. SUVs, said Ford, are three times more likely than regular cars to kill occupants of other cars in a crash. And their own occupants are not safe either. Death rates in SUVs are as high as in cars, because SUVs tend to roll over and to crumple.

Breathtaking confession. Maybe the era of corporate denial is passing. Indeed, Ford warned that if car companies don't fix the problems of SUVs, their reputation might some day fall to the level of tobacco companies.

He talked of fixing the vans, however, making them safer and more fuel-efficient, not ceasing to make them. Honesty, yes; sacrifice of profit for public safety, not yet. But in the third story a company goes one step further, phasing out a problem product by its own decision.

The company is 3M, which prides itself on its environmental record. The questionable product is an organic fluorine compound of many uses. Most of us use it to repel stains and call it Scotchgard. Three years ago the company was doing a routine blood test of its workers, part of its ongoing concern for workers' health. For comparison with people who do not work in a chemical factory, it also tested blood from a commercial blood bank.

It found tiny amounts of Scotchgard in the general public's blood. Utterly surprised, the company looked further and found its trademark organofluorines in people and wildlife all over the globe. The only place it wasn't found was in the stored blood of Korean War soldiers -- samples taken before Scotchgard was invented.