Original subtitles

It was about ten years ago now.

I just found myself scrolling through a few things and then stumbled across this

story of a man who claimed that the people of Wales were being poisoned.

I just wanted to know what on earth was going on.

And the man behind the claims was Douglas Gowan, a farming consultant who

spent almost half a century investigating a potential chemical

scandal in Wales.

So I managed to kind of make contact, and he said to me, if I wanted to find

out the truth, I'd have to get to him quick because he had weeks to live.

There you go.

Can you tell me what led to starting to find this out?

So I got a camera and interviewed Douglas Gowan for two days.

What he told me...

made my blood run cold.

It was shocking.

Monsanto had dumped huge amounts of industrial chemicals all around Wales,

some of the worst contaminants known to man.

Douglas warned that PCBs, polychlorinated by phenols, so-called

forever chemicals, mass-produced in the 60s and 70s, had been buried all over

Wales. The effect of these chemicals may not be immediate, but that doesn't

diminish their severity.

Authorities found the chemicals are poisonous and may cause cancer.

Certain species are going to be wiped out.

What has definitely happened in animal population is now happening in the human

population.

Ever since, I've been trying to work out whether what he told me was true.

Could you show me where are the places that Douglas said there is danger?

My search has taken me all the way to Anniston, Alabama.

We're in Anniston now.

Once the center of Monsanto's American PCB operation, where residents told me

how PCBs had devastated their lives.

My brother, he had cancer, and they made a brain tumor.

They fought back and they took Monsanto to court. We did soil samplings. We had

toxicologists that talked about the risk.

Back in the UK, we started digging and found

PCBs still escaping sites across Wales and northwest England.

I think it's no longer we think. We've got evidence to suggest that's leaking

and PCBs are getting out.

Now, I want to know if Douglas' warning was right.

PCBs do not degrade.

If they get into your tissues, they build up.

Are these toxic chemicals getting into the people of Wales?

My surgeon, he said, this is strange. He said, I've never seen this type of

cancer. It's not a coincidence.

And if so, what can be done to keep us safe?

If we fail to act now, it won't be history that judges us.

It will be the future.

It's a silent killer.

It's buried, isn't it?

But it's going to come back.

Hello. Hey, Michael. How's it going? Hi, Dan.

Hi, Lucy.

I'm just on the way to Laban.

Since we started this journey, environmental journalists Dan and Lucy

have been hearing from residents in a small North Wales village.

Worried about what they feel is an unusually high number of cancer cases.

Since we've been digging into all this, we've had people email us saying that

they're scared.

They believe that the chemicals might somehow be getting into people and

making them ill.

I heard Douglas talking about Ruaban, and it's sort of come up a few times,

but I didn't realise the importance of it, really, so it'll be really

interesting to find out whatever I can up here.

Monsanto. had their headquarters from a technical side up in Ruaban.

A major European hub for Monsanto, the Ruaban factory produced chemicals used

in agriculture, pharmaceutical and rubber production, as well as processing

PCBs.

The people have lived alongside the Monsanto plant for over 40 years, and

Monsanto's excellent safety record to date ensures a peaceful coexistence

between the villages and their principal employer.

The Ruabon Works closed in 2011.

Katie? Local resident Katie has offered to show me what's left of the plant.

Where are we? I have no idea where we are. So, formerly, this was a lorry path

because that was the main gate to Monsanto site.

This is the site of Monsanto? Yeah.

It separates three villages.

Kevin Mower that way, Trevor that way, and Akrabaya that way.

If you want to go on a tour and see where we are, you're going to have to go

through the villages because it splits them all apart.

Yeah, I'd love to have a look. Yeah, that would be brilliant. If you could

show me where you lived and all that, that would be brilliant.

At its height, Monsanto's plant and warehouses covered 160 acres

and dominated the landscape.

So this fence is the back part that we would have seen from the car park.

Ah, right, yeah. And that looks right out across the site.

When this site closed down, why did it get closed down? We don't really know.

Apparently production moving elsewhere in the world, as far as I can find out.

And then they started decommissioning it and pulling down all the structures and

the work part of it.

to make it safe, they said. OK. Have there been concerns about contamination

generally? Yeah. There's a site opposite where I grew up, where myself and my

sister saw them dumping a lot of powder-based chemicals.

They went through this gate here.

Behind there, where it says, Gate 22, private property, keep out.

People saw.

Yes, we saw the trucks going up regularly and there would be dust all

over the roads as they were going up because the lorries were full.

Have people felt that maybe there is illness specifically to do with Monsanto

sites? Yes. Really? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. What sort of things have people...

Well, we know that there seems to be a lot more cancer locally than other

places. Really?

Yeah, we seem to get a lot of diagnosis of cancer here.

I've personally had one.

You've had one? I've had breast cancer, yeah.

Really? Yes, yeah. So, my nana died of organ cancer. She worked there. There

are lots of people in the area.

Though stories like Katie's are worrying, on their own, they're not hard

evidence.

But they do tally with Douglas's fears.

I expect there to be a raft of chronic illness coming out of the

residents from those sites, and it will affect future generations.

Listening to Douglas, I find myself asking another question.

Why did a global chemical giant like Monsanto choose Wales in the first

place?

Throughout the 20th century, the decline of coal and steel left gaps in

communities across Wales.

Gaps increasingly filled by companies like Monsanto.

The plant is a vital source of jobs in an area where such things are harder

than ever to find.

They were bringing employment, they were bringing, you know, potentially wealth

to the area. Obviously, there is a great hunger and desire for that to come.

But Douglas believed there was another reason that made communities like this

attractive.

People grew up with the knowledge that they lived in a part of the world where,

because they were in an area that had coal mining, heavy industry, the

environment was contaminated and there were health problems.

If one wanted to be cynical about it, You could say that almost they were

choosing places where chronic health issues might be hidden behind pre

-existing health issues.

It's really quite eerie looking at

this abandoned Monsanto site here.

Just leaving it like this, I think there's a sense that...

Because this place is shut down, any possible safety issues or contamination

that there was has now disappeared. But of course, as we know, with PCBs, they

don't go away.

Looking at the abandoned site now, it's difficult to imagine the place as a

bustling industrial hub, which at its height employed 2,000 local people.

Shall I sit down here? Good, yeah. Got a coffee?

Mervyn worked at the Monsanto plant for over 40 years.

What was the place like when you first started working there? What was the

atmosphere like? My first impressions when I started, it was quite scary,

actually. It was a big factory in a small area, if you know what I mean.

Because it was just so big, is that what was a bit scary?

Yeah, yeah.

Plus the fact, you know, the steam blowing off the chemicals, you know, the

smell of the chemicals.

OK. So as time went on then and you were there... Yeah. Over the years. Did you

have concerns around safety things?

I was worried about my health, you know, breathing in the fumes or the, you know,

the dust, you know, like the rubber chemicals that you used to get a lot of

dust in the air, you know.

And they had a particular plant there, PVI, I don't know whether anybody's

mentioned that one, and it smelled like cat's pee.

You know, you'd go home, you'd have a shower, you'd be lying in bed, you know,

and your wife would say, oh, my God, what's this smell?

You know, the pillows and the sheets would be, like, stinking.

I mean, even the aspirin plant, you'd walk up the stairs with your bare hands,

you'd get the salicylic acid on you and it would take the skin off your hands,

you know.

And there was genuine concerns about this.

And I still have them concerns today, you know, because I always say to my,

you know, my son, if I do die of something strange, you know, get, you

know. Take it up.

You've said that to your son? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So were you worried about things like contamination outside of the plant?

Ground contamination, yeah.

They had a centrifuge system that took the liquor out the chemicals and then

they actually paid farmers to take it away and spread it on their fields.

Really? Yeah, yeah.

And was that safe to put that stuff into their fields? I would think not.

It's hard to believe that any responsible company would send waste to

be disposed of on farmland.

Douglas's files show the factory not only processed PCBs, now recognized as

Class I carcinogens just like tobacco, it was also a major production center

for other highly toxic industrial chemicals.

Which raises another question for me.

If waste was being disposed of around Ruaban, who owned this land?

And why would they agree to it?

Hey, Michael. So we just managed to track down a 94-year-old

former waste operator who has information back from the 70s.

His name's...

Herwine's family used to farm land in the area, and he's agreed to show me

some of the local dump sites linked to the factory.

So where are the different places now? Can you show me? Yes.

I'll have to go outside here now. OK.

I'll point out, as I said, this was the old entrance now, on the left-hand side

there. Yeah.

And that's where Monsanto tipped. Right.

It was three and a half or four acres.

Right. Big quarry.

Now, the other tip, on your right-hand side, the first property, that was the

tip up there. Right.

How many of those are on land owned by you?

One. Right. Which one?

The one on the left-hand side of the old quarry.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, Hedewijn oversaw dozens of trucks a week tipping

chemical waste onto his land.

So you were overseeing all the wagons? Yes.

Dumping stuff over that whole area, right?

Yes. I was with them for, what was it, 20 years, I think. I won't tell you how

much they paid me, but they paid me very well.

Right, yeah.

Did you know what sort of stuff you were having to shift for them?

Not really.

They were tipping some, I don't know what it was, a yellow-grey sort of

stuff. I've no idea what it was.

But as far as I was concerned, it was waste.

I wasn't bothered what material it was at all. All I wanted was to make sure I

was getting my pound.

And they used to get on with it.

But I suppose one of the worries is that a lot of that stuff that they were

dumping back then hasn't gone away. It's still there, you know. It's still there,

yes.

Yes, and it's not likely to go away.

The fact that Hirwine had no idea what was being buried on his own land seems

mind-boggling.

But then I suppose it isn't that much of a surprise because, you know, you don't

want to bite the hand that feeds, really, do you?

When something has been so central to a community, like the Monsanto factory,

giving jobs, giving employment, giving a wage, putting food on people's tables,

it makes for a very complicated relationship with it.

Why would you ask awkward questions?

According to Douglas, none of this should come as a surprise.

There was no regulation at the time.

Neither chemical industry or manufacturing industry was facing any

regulation on how they disposed of anything.

They could dump it wherever they wanted to, and they did.

Records from National Resources Wales, the organisation set up to protect the

environment, show that there are over 1,500 former dump sites across Wales.

sites that may have been used by Monsanto and other companies for the

disposal of industrial waste.

But very few appear to have been tested for toxicity.

Welcome. Well done finding it. You know we're in the right place when you see

one of those, don't you?

Environmental campaigner Reverend Paul Cawthorn has spent years researching

former chemical dump sites.

What is this place?

This is a lagoon where some of the stuff from the Monsanto factory was dumped.

But there's also about half a dozen individual dump sites scattered over the

other side of it.

Is that the lagoon there? Yes, that's it. You can see the size of it. Wow.

Yeah. It's like a lake.

Yeah. Yeah.

This 100-metre-wide former dump site lies just two miles north of the Roabon

Works.

It's so toxic, the barrels themselves have rotted away.

At the bottom of the lagoon, you've got the contents of the barrels just sitting

there. I mean, that's just full of a toxic soup, right? Yeah, yeah.

When was the dumping being done?

This was probably in the 70s mostly, but it started earlier.

There was even a fire here, I think it was about 1980.

There was a big fire and loads of fire engines around and it's in the local

press how bad it was.

Paul, do you know when that fire happened, was there water like this? Was

it already a lagoon? Oh yeah, it was already a lagoon. That's never good, is

it, when the lagoon sets on fire?

The fire made national news.

60 firefighters battled over 18 hours, bringing the blaze under control, with

the effects of the chemicals reportedly felt up to 20 miles away.

A fence went up in 2007.

Before then, there was nothing to warn people of the dangers here.

Michael? Good afternoon, Michael.

I'm Michael.

Michael has lived in the area all his life.

and used to play at the lagoon as a child.

So that was near where you lived? That was within five minutes' walk from my

house. We weren't there when it was actually set on fire, but as kids, first

thing you want to do is go there. Of course.

And there was fire engines there and police were there and they just couldn't

put it out.

So you were growing up, what, in the 80s, same as me?

Mid-70s to 80s, yeah.

And so at that time, you and your friends, what would you do around there?

When we were young, we all had air guns.

So you'd go up there and you'd be shooting like the reeds. And then there

was barrels sticking out of the water all over the place. And they were

rusting. And if you shot at them, all these powders were coming out. All

colours.

So at some point, you started to realise that... You'd been affected

by this. Yeah, it happened in 2000, 2001.

I started getting lumps on my shoulder.

I caught cancer.

I lost a large part of my shoulder. It's literally as wide as my hand there. Wow.

And while he was operating my surgeon, he said, this is strange. He said, I've

never... Never seen this type of cancer before.

And he'd had a distinguished career of, what, 40 years?

Do you know of anyone else who had sort of health consequences?

Yeah, yeah. I lost a very close friend who used to be there all the time, more

there than me.

He died of breast cancer.

I've had another friend who's passed away with brain cancer.

I've got another friend who's now got brain cancer and is trying to get over

brain cancer.

I've got another friend who's had all his lymph glands taken out because they

were cancerous.

And these are all friends who played in that area?

Yeah, I was talking to a friend and he said, oh, I'm going to see your surgeon

next week. He said, I've got a lump on my back.

My surgeon said, for me to catch what I had was like winning the lottery.

For your friend, who lives down the road, to get exactly the same...

He said, it's like winning the lottery every day for six months.

It's not a coincidence.

I've got a son and he keeps asking me, well, if you've had it, is it in me?

Am I going to get cancer when I get older?

Hearing a father say his son has asked him, am I going to get cancer as well?

It's quite powerful, quite moving.

It's sort of seeing what Douglas was talking about, our children and our

children's children.

It's really hard to hear that.

Listening to all this, I keep coming back to the same question.

Why is nothing being done about it?

Hello, I'm Lucy.

Thank you so much for your time.

Paul Pemberton has been a local councillor for over 20 years.

For as long as you can remember, it's always been a dump site.

It's been abused.

That area has been abused for many, many years.

Myself and colleagues, we put a lot of work into it over the years in Wrexham

Council, and they brought this company and met them on site there.

They came down and done a bit of testing.

I brought that report along. You can have a look at it and the list of the

chemicals. It's all in the report.

Cyanide, arsenic, PCBs.

What did they say should happen?

The actual scientists said that it needs to be remediated. You know, there's no

question about it.

Excavation and separation of contaminated soil. I mean, clean it up.

That is what should happen. That's what I'm saying, yeah.

But the cost of the remediation, we were quoted then around about £45 million,

and that would bankrupt the council if they were to do it. You know, that's

what killed it. There's just no money to do it.

You need support on a national level.

Does the council say it's safe and it's not a threat to people?

Well, from the actual security of the site, that's the only way they've said

it's safe, because...

They've put the fence around it. But just to put a fence around this is just

like putting a sticky plaster on it.

And that one's going to burst one day.

The more I'm learning about places like Roabon, the easier it becomes to see how

this has happened.

This path here, I guess, is where trucks would have been coming down from the

old, the main Monsanto plant, and come down to here.

The problem exists.

It's been created.

And in my view, the companies responsible should be made to remediate.

They should pay for us doing our best to minimize the problem.

Solution UK Limited, a subsidiary of Eastman Chemical Company, formerly

Flexis, Ruaban Works.

She's gone through a few name changes.

Monsanto as we know it.

no longer exists, which means there's all the more reason for the authorities

to step in.

Please have a seat.

MP Steve Witherden represents the villages around the Roabon site.

Because it is a very complicated area to try and work out whether you can make

the people originally responsible for this, like, accountable for it.

it sort of leaves the councils, it seems to me, in a position where they're

worried that they might be held financially responsible for this. And as

you know, councils don't have enough money to do that. I mean, so what seems

to be happening is councils just stop it from going any further. I think people

can feel like they're just sort of...

shouting into the void a bit, and that seems wrong.

You're representing this constituency, aren't you? Absolutely.

Perhaps I was naive when I first became an MP in thinking that

everyone would listen if you uncover something that is really worrying.

Comments coming in from constituents about orange streams, these orange

streams around where the chemical plant was, kind of a rainbowy...

Petroly sheen on the top of it, but even a Member of Parliament, it's not always

easy to get things moving.

I have been asking Natural Resources Wales, what I've asked, I've said, you

know, what monitoring is going on? What testing are you doing of the soil, of

the water?

Natural Resources Wales did confirm to me that one of these areas, they are

regularly testing.

And I said, yeah, OK, that's one.

You know, many, many constituents have told me about, you know, these other

areas around the villages.

As it stands, as far as I've been informed, they are not being monitored.

Have they given you a reason? Is it because they just assume that they're

safe or is it a funding issue?

What's the reason? My understanding is, and that's not just on this issue, I

speak with Natural Resources Wales about other issues as well, as you'd expect as

an MP, and my understanding is that they are very stretched.

they're stretched pretty thin.

Coming here now and hearing the stories,

I feel like There has been a problem here and it's gone unnoticed with

people's health.

The problem we always have with these things is that it's very difficult to

pin it down to being able to say for certain this caused this. It's very

complicated.

We're desperately trying to find evidence.

But the thing that is compelling for me is when you hear people talk about the

impact it's had on their lives in the past and how it might affect their

children in the future. That is powerful stuff.

But in the absence of actual evidence, it's, you know, what can you do about

it?

Why don't we do what nobody is doing?

Find out what is in people's blood.

Nobody tests in this country. There are a handful of people who know their own

PCBs.

Let's ask people if they would find out.

I mean, would you?

Yeah, if it's useful.

And if it helps other people to, you know, come forward and do it, then yeah,

absolutely. It will always be indicative, but I remember looking at

the files.

Douglas keeps talking about blood and testing. He talks about his own blood.

He was worried he'd been poisoned by PCBs. I mean, he would want us to test

blood, I think.

Especially when you've got people like Michael saying, please find answers,

please find what this is about.

For my sake, for my children's sake, for my friends' sake.

We have to. We have to. Because nobody else is doing it.

PCBs, unlike, say, cyanide, which is an instant and dramatic killer, it takes

30 years and then starts to do damage.

This way.

This is your seat.

Rather like cancer and smoking.

Epidemiology becomes a very important part of this.

Blood sampling could prove a vital piece of the jigsaw.

Scientist Dave Megson and his team from Manchester Metropolitan University are

here to test the blood of 11 people we've met along the way. Thank you so

much for agreeing to take part in this. Including Katie from Ruabon. The plan

today is we take just a small...

Sample of your blood. Are you ready as well?

The two Jans from Unnisthi in South Wales.

OK.

Paul and Wendy, whose farmland showed very high levels of PCBs.

There's 209 different PCBs, and I'm going to look for the presence of all

209. And Michael, who played at the lagoon and had cancer.

We won't be able to kind of give any medical diagnosis, but what we will be

able to do is to kind of show you how close you are to the average or the

norm. Okay, so if you can make a fist for me with that hand, keep it tight.

Of the 11 people taking part, nine live near former dump sites, where we found

elevated levels of PCBs in the soil.

I can tell you, because I've had biopsies done, I have a level of PCBs in

me.

I took it in through the air, I took it in through the skin pores, because we

didn't know whether to wear gloves or masks.

So, again, make a fist for me, please, and we'll just use the arm of the chair

there just to hold it.

But I don't live near any of the sites, so I'm curious to know what my own blood

will show.

OK, with your other hand, if you press down on there nice and firmly, keep it

on there for about a minute, OK? OK.

Done. Where is it?

Look at that.

We're not expecting to find anything.

I mean, I should be typical, right? Even though I've been to some potentially

contaminated sites doing this.

These are present in low concentrations in absolutely everybody.

The reason we test for O2O9 is that it allows us to get a better chemical

fingerprint. And this should try and help us find out where these PCBs may

have come from.

But for general people, 95% plus of our exposure comes from the food we eat.

Right. So you just walking across a couple of those contaminated sites on an

ad hoc basis, I don't think you'll get any real exposure. And what is the kind

of norm based on?

In the UK, we only have really limited data, so we don't really know what the

average levels are in the UK population.

So the one I'm going to compare us against is a database from the United

States. So the United States have done some really detailed monitoring programs

of their population.

Our sample size is small, but it could give us an indication of whether more

widespread testing would be worthwhile.

I think there's a need for statistical analysis that's going to help actually

define the hotspots of...

PCB problems in the future.

It would be nice to know if I've got a high level of PCBs it'd just be nice to

get answers.

There's not a definitive answer for any of us but it will give us an idea if

there has been pollution of PCBs here and if that has then had an impact

within the community.

While our blood samples are being analysed, Dan and Lucy have been digging

deeper into the archives.

It's really frustrating how difficult it is to get any actual hard data on

illnesses. And yet, there's these.

The health board was worried enough to investigate cancer clusters.

They've unearthed documents suggesting official concerns about unusually high

levels of cancer in Roabon go back 20 years.

The local health board commissioned an investigation into cancer clusters

around the factory, two of them three years apart.

The confusing thing is, completely different findings.

To help us make sense of the two reports, we've asked consultant

oncologist Marcus Cumberbatch in Sheffield to give us his view.

Marcus's research focuses on the links between chemical exposure and cancer.

So this study, I think you've seen it, is from a place called Wraben in North

Wales. What was it that they were looking for in this survey?

What they were looking for is whether or not there was a higher than average

number of cases of a whole range of cancers. Things like liver cancer,

bladder cancer, skin, lung and some blood-borne cancers. So the more common

ones that are associated with environmental chemical agents.

So what they did was they found an area of concern from that factory and then

they drew two rings around it and one was two kilometres and one was seven and

a half.

They found that actually The people in the seven and a half kilometre area were

more likely to die from cancer in general and in particular in the case of

liver cancer they were more likely to just get the disease in the first place.

What they do is years later they do another survey and they find there

aren't elevated levels of cancers.

What's going on there?

In the second study what they've done is they've essentially aggregated all of

the people within this area to try and see if that changes the outcome.

But essentially, more people unaffected by cancer are included in the sample,

bringing the average rate of cancer down, so it's no longer significant.

But also, they assign a different confidence interval.

95% confidence intervals are the standard in a lot of these studies. That

is very much the gold standard.

However, in the second study, they abandoned that tradition and they went

to the 99% confidence interval.

So they set themselves a much higher burden of proof, and the reason they've

given is that they want to minimise a chance finding, given we're looking at

low numbers of people.

I think what you're saying is we don't know for sure whether there is a cancer

cluster in this area or not, but the point is that the authorities might not

know either.

That's right, yeah, and it's whether we're happy to be in the dark, which I

wouldn't be if my life was potentially at risk.

We have something that's raised an alarm bell. There's more information, more

granular information required, and that's why more work is needed here to

be done.

There's a big part of me that wants to believe that if there is a danger out

there, then people in authority and people who are in positions of power

would, of course, want to look after their communities.

So Dave has called and said that the test results are back for my blood test.

I had quite a sleepless night last night. Not because of this, I don't

think. But, you know, who knows what's going on in your head. I mean, I'm not

anticipating some terrible shock.

I mean, I haven't been living around a toxic dump site and I haven't been

wading around in the stuff. But just knowing what the PCB levels in my blood

are at all, even if it's...

Typical is still a bit weird.

It's chilling to think that having any PCBs in your blood is normal, when 90

years ago, no one would have had them, as they didn't exist.

There's 209 PCBs. All of them have this hexagon structure, which is carbon,

and then there's 209 different...

ways we can put chlorine around the side of them.

The more chlorine we've got, the more persistent they are.

If we get chlorine in specific positions, it also makes them more toxic

as well.

There's 12 dioxin-like PCBs, so chlorinated dioxins are really, really

toxic. The one of greatest concern is PCB 126. This is the most toxic

PCB. And another one that we see quite often is PCB 118.

So what we found with PCBs, based on that dioxin-like toxicity, there's no

safe level of PCBs. It's a risk that all of us have to try and manage. The

lower your level of PCBs, the lower your risk of getting cancer.

And the higher your level of PCBs, the higher your risk of suffering from these

diseases. Right. So this is a chromatogram.

Each one of those mountains is a PCB.

Right. And this is what's been taken from...

from your blood sample.

So the good news is you're in the bottom 15 percentile, so 85% of the US

population from your demographic would have higher PCB concentrations than you,

so that is good news. That's good.

But we detected 81 different PCBs inside you, so you're not free of PCBs by any

stretch of the imagination. 81 different PCBs.

Are there any 126 ones in there?

We can have a look if you want. Please. Yeah.

That's the Hannibal Lecter of PCBs, and I'd like to just get that in there

straight away. Yeah, so... There's PCB 118 in quite a... That's 118.

That's 118. Which is one of the... One of the toxics. More unpleasant ones. Not

the most toxic. OK. The other one, 126, is the most potent one.

Yeah, that one's... So that's there as well? That one's there. OK.

So there it is.

PCBs were banned 40 years ago.

Yet I still have 81 different types inside me.

But PCBs are just the beginning of the forever chemical story.

Their introduction paved the way for a whole new generation.

Polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS for short.

PFAS, also referred to as forever chemicals, are in many of our family

household items.

They're used to make things durable, waterproof and greaseproof, and can be

found in clothes and electronics, medical equipment and solar panels.

And just like PCBs, they persist in the environment.

Our rivers and seas are now full of these highly toxic chemicals.

And each time one animal eats another, a little more builds up.

Which means the higher up the food chain you go, the higher the levels become.

Ten years ago, scientists at London Zoo began studying the impact of pollutants

like PCBs on the UK's marine life.

Background levels in the environment are...

becoming significant.

The fact is that certain species are going to be wiped out because of PCBs.

You can see the skin.

That's the layer that we would test to try and analyze, quantify the levels of

PCBs in the animal.

Examining the fatty tissue from stranded marine mammals, Dr. Rosie Williams has

been building a clear picture of how persistent PCBs still are.

In every animal that we test, we will quantify some level of PCBs.

These chemicals are really difficult for animals to metabolize. That's why they

build up over their lifespan.

So in animals that have the longest lifespan, you'll typically see higher

levels of things like PCBs because they're not being able to excrete them.

And also there's been some work looking at bottlenose dolphins and then calf

survival. We find that when this maternal PCB blubber concentration is a

certain level, then the probability of a calf surviving beyond six months is

significantly reduced.

And that's because PCBs can be passed through the milk.

How at threat are some of our species then? Like, take killer whales in the

UK. Yeah, so killer whales obviously are right at the top of the food chain.

And unfortunately in the UK we had a resident population of killer whales on

the west coast.

But it's hypothesised that they're going to go extinct and a lot of people

believe that the reason for that is because of the levels of PCBs that are

in them. No way, so we'll lose them?

Yeah, there are two males left. There was a female that stranded in 2016 known

as Lulu in Tairi.

And she had levels that were over 100 times that threshold for toxicological

impacts that we discussed.

This is insane. So their animals have to be treated as toxic waste at that point,

obviously. They have huge, huge lungs. Their animals have become toxic waste.

Yeah.

I'm feeling my heart race a little bit here because you're one of the first

people to say, well, actually, our marine life are consuming these. Our

oceans are contaminated by these.

And the fish that we eat are contaminated by these too.

So we're presumably part of that process as well. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's why we see, especially because we're mammals, right?

So we lactate. And where you see these NHS guidelines, and the guidelines are

different for little girls versus little boys, because little girls might go on

to have babies. So they're told to eat smaller amounts of these fish that

contain PCBs.

That for me is heartbreaking.

What Rosie has told us is shocking, and I suspect most people don't even realise

it. For decades, the NHS has advised girls and pregnant women to limit

themselves to two portions of oily fish and some white fish a week.

Not because fish is bad for you, but because they contain pollutants like

PCBs that build up in us and may harm babies before they're even born.

PCBs moving through the food chain could explain why they've ended up in my body.

But what I want to know now is whether there's any link between the elevated

PCBs we found in the soil at sites around Wales and in the north of

England, and the blood samples taken from the people living close to them.

So these are the results of the blood testing?

Yeah. You remember we've done 11 tests of people that we've met.

And there is something unexpected in there.

If you look at inner steve, the people we tested had the same specific types of

PCBs, a fingerprint, if you like.

Not only that, but we found the PCBs, the same PCBs in the soils near where

they live.

Yeah. I think what's interesting about this is that we're showing that there

could be a link.

And the only answer we can think of is they all live near a PCB landfill.

That we know has the same Monsanto PCBs in the soil.

Right.

What we're talking about here is the results of a tiny bit

of testing, just the beginning of doing some testing.

There is something else in there.

I can tell you most of the people who've done 11 tests, most of them have lower

than average levels of PCBs in their blood.

Lower than average? Lower than average.

So we're trying to work this out, but they could have got PCB contamination in

the past, possibly from a landfill, and in the years or decades since, their

levels have gone down.

So nine had lower than average, but not all of them did.

The two people who came back higher than average were Paul, the farmer who

you met in the north of England, and Michael, in the north of Wales, in

Ruaban, who swam in the lagoon.

What's striking is where those two highest readings have come from.

Paul. whose farmland in Alvinley showed the highest level of PCBs of all our

soil testing.

And Michael, who played next to the toxic lagoon near Ruaban as a child.

Hello, Michael, how are you?

Hello, good morning.

It's good to catch up with you now I've got my results.

Yeah, so, I mean, tell me, how are you feeling about that?

I sort of expected it, but when it's sort of...

In black and white, it comes as a bit of a shock, you know? What has it made you

feel about all those things that you've suspected for a long time?

Well, it's brought them home to a home truth, really. I just sort of pushed

them into the back of my head and got on with my life.

This was the first time we'd taken it to such a degree.

There it is. There's a connection to be made there, isn't there?

Up until now, it feels like there's just been individual...

bits not aware of the other pieces of the puzzle around we're trying to

connect those up and and see if we can take this forward it's only proof that

gets things done it's our next generation and it's still going to be

there in our next generation and it needs a closure

with elevated levels of

pcbs in his blood michael and others like him could have grounds to take the

chemical giant to court, much like the people of Anniston, Alabama, who spent

over a decade fighting Monsanto.

There are communities in Wales who are trying to fight this. What advice would

you give them?

First, I would tell them to organize because the people have more power than

they think.

Just like in the U.S., any legal fight could take years.

And this is where a lot of the water would come down. You see, this is part

of it. This gully here.

But after everything I've seen on this journey... Michael. I'm Michael. It

feels like the people living alongside these sites have waited long enough.

Paul lost his father to cancer.

I always say to my son, if I do die of something strange, you know, take it up.

So, on their behalf...

I want to appeal to those closer to home, those who are elected to protect

us and to protect our land.

I feel like it's what Douglas would want too.

We've got to do something about the legacy left by Monsanto in Wales

and in England.

We do have the powers.

to make them the responsible party and make them remediate.

So I'm going to the Senedd building in Cardiff, which is the Welsh Parliament,

to kind of present the concerns that we've got and the concerns of the

communities that we've spoken to all around Wales and beyond to the Senedd

members.

and we're going to lay out the worries that we have and the concerns that we

have and the urgency that we feel that there is. And we're hoping that the

Senedd members who are there will get behind this.

Not only Senedd members will be there, we'll also have a lot of the people that

I've spoken to and met from communities all over Wales, many of whom we'll be

meeting for the first time today.

It's going to be a huge thing for a lot of these people to be able to share

their stories with each other. And I think a big deal as well for them to see

that we are actually speaking to people who've got the opportunity to do

something about this.

This is a very new issue to me, PCV.

Communities from across Wales are coming together to raise the profile of

something that's been obviously an issue in local communities for a very long

time.

The recognition of the future problems is the way in which you'll grab the

world's attention and the public attention.

Get them then to voice the message by saying through politicians,

we have to deal with this problem.

Hello, Boreda.

Thanks ever so much for coming today.

I'm here today because of something, or more accurately, someone I stumbled

across a few years ago now.

Douglas Gowan.

Douglas was a man who, decades ago, witnessed and investigated tons of

toxic chemicals being dumped across Wales.

He believed that the chemicals being dumped in Welsh land weren't just an

environmental issue, but a long-term threat to human health.

The chemical group Douglas identified are called polychlorinated biphenyls, or

PCBs. And I'll let him tell you the start of that story himself.

1967 is the beginning of the story.

And I see this calf.

Three legs, no tail, no genitalia.

I just wanted to know what on earth was going on.

It's very scary what we've discovered.

There was no regulation at the time. They could dump industrial chemicals

wherever they wanted to, and they did.

This stuff builds up in the environment, builds up in animals and fish, and it

builds up in us.

We think it causes cancers.

It's a silent killer.

Wales is home to some of the worst PCB dump sites in the world.

I've been speaking to many people living near legacy dump sites and factories who

are deeply worried about the rise in health problems in their communities.

The testing that we did is just the tip of the iceberg. It's just scratching at

the surface.

More testing needs to be done.

These people deserve more.

They deserve their concerns to be met with proper research and appropriate

action.

Douglas spent most of his life fighting to get the truth out there.

I suppose me trying to push this forward is in some way to pay him back for that.

We may already have lost people to these chemicals.

Not to mention the risks to key species, our land and our rivers and waters.

Doing nothing is not a neutral position.

It is a decision.

One that passes risk forward rather than confronting it now.

So I'm not standing here today to accuse.

I'm standing here to ask.

To ask, what good reason is there?

to not reduce the risk for the people of Wales now by cleaning up the polluted

land and waterways.

If the only answer to that is funding, then I'm here to ask you to rethink

priorities and rewrite the wrongs of the past.

Because if we fail to act now, it won't be history that judges us.

It will be the future.

I'll leave the last word to Douglas.

Politicians have to take notice and force companies to deal with the

problems of the future.

This was always my view.

I wasn't after retribution. I wasn't after compensation.

I just wanted to do the correct thing.

I think Douglas would have mixed feelings.

You know, he spoke in places like this where his voice should have been heard

and taken seriously and acted upon, and it wasn't. But just having people

brought together today in this place is a huge moment and helps people to feel

validated and that their story is being heard.

I'd like to think that this will be the start of change.

If we can all stick together, let's hope we can move forward to the next step,

whatever that is.

It's got to be a collaborative effort, so we have to be working together.

The fact that we all have traces of this chemical in our blood shows that we all

have skin in the game, so we've got to get together, we've got to fight this,

we've got to get the money, we've got to get a conversation, we've got to put

this right.

We need to take action. And Michael has reminded us that we can't keep putting

this off. There are youngsters, there are children here today whose future

depends on dealing with these issues.

Ten years ago now, Douglas Gowan told me the story of his life and of his

struggle and of his battle to get the truth out there.

And... You know, within months, he was dead.

I've lived with PCBs, and I'm saying to you, 50 years plus

on, there's a problem here, and it will affect future generations.

Probability is I won't see it, but will it happen?

I'd bet on it.

To be able to vindicate him?

and keep going with what he was trying to do would be great.

You can step into the role of decision maker and discover how your choices

could affect the environment with bonus interactive content from the Open

University.

Scan the QR code on screen or go to connect.open.ac.uk forward slash

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