Ecoimagination Or Ecohype? GE On The Hot Seat

General Electric has been promoting itself for years as an enlightened company when it comes to climate change and environmental challenges facing the globe. It launched a branding campaign in 2005 called “Ecomagination” spending nearly a hundred million dollars touting the need to press for cleaner, efficient sources of energy, reduced emissions and abundant sources of clean water.

If you look at data supplied on its web site, GE, the Connecticut based conglomerate, the 10th largest corporation in the world, has increased investment in ecological R&D projects, reduced water consumption by two percent and reduced energy intensity by fifty percent.

But while GE makes great efforts in the green movement, the company again is stalling efforts to cleanup New York’s Hudson River where it dumped at least 1.3 million pounds of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls or PCB’s which cause cancer in animals and are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as probable human carcinogens.

The Department of Environmental Conservation in 1976 made it illegal to fish the Upper Hudson due to the toxic pollution and warned people of the danger of eating tainted fish.

GE, after decades of legal proceedings that stymied the cleanup process, agreed in 2006 to clean up PCB’s spewed from its plants at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward from 1947 to 1977. GE began dredging the river to free it of toxic sediments last year. Only10 percent of the material was removed.

Now, GE is asking to delay the continuing effort to clean up the river. It wants the E.P.A. to give it another year to decide whether to proceed with dredging, saying it wants to study the effects of the Phase One dredging before moving onto Phase Two.

According to the 2006 Consent Decree, GE retains the option to not proceed with Phase Two of the dredging project. The company also is pursuing a law suit to declare the Superfund law unconstitutional. The 200 miles of the river contaminated with PCB’s stretching from Hudson Falls to New York City is the largest Superfund site in the U.S.

GE in a statement said, “that resuspension and redeposition of PCB’s resulting from the dredging process itself pose significant concerns and warrant additional analysis; that limits should be established on the quantity of PCB’s that dredging is permitted to resuspend and send downstream; that additional data should be collected and analyzed, and that a state-of-the-art, quantitative computer model should be jointly developed by EPA and GE to guide decisions about future dredging.”

GE’s position is backed by a peer review of seven independent scientists who stated that the “performance standards established by EPA to govern the dredging project could not be met in Phase 1 and cannot be met in Phase 2 without significant changes.”

The problem for GE is that these delaying actions further tarnish its image as a solid corporate citizen and negate its Ecoimagination effort. If the company is simply trying to stall the cleanup that puts lives at risk and the economy at stake along the Hudson, it will backfire and damage its already damaged reputation.

If GE really is serious about the environment, it will make every effort to resume the clean up as soon as possible and not try to push the work to a later time.

If the public perceives that GE is balking at its responsibility to restore one of America’s most important rivers for future generations, GE can forget its Ecoimagination campaign which will just be considered Ecohype.