Good Things To Life: GE, PCBs and Our Town

April 25 & 26 - 2004

While most Americans associate General Electric with appliances and light bulbs, and more recently with life-saving medical equipment, there is another, darker side to the GE story. Good Things to Life tells the tale of GE, PCBs, and the small city of Pittsfield, MA. Pittsfield was home to GE's transformer and capacitor divisions, and electrical generating equipment built and repaired in Pittsfield powered the electrical utility grid throughout the nation. In the early ‘30s, GE began to use PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls. Despite mounting evidence that workers exposed to PCBs were experiencing negative health effects, not until the mid-’70s did the U.S. E.P.A. announce there was enough evidence that PCBs posed a threat to the environment and human health to ban their use. But by that time more than a billion and half pounds of PCBs had made their way into the earth's environment, and today measurable amounts are found in the bloodstreams and fatty tissue of every human being and much wildlife. Good Things To Life looks at the struggle to make GE take responsibility for their massive pollution.