Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-04-Speech-3-376"
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"en.20090204.20.3-376"2
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"Mr President, my colleague mentioned the murky channels by which PCBs came into the food chain in Ireland. I think maybe it is worse, sometimes looking back at the history of PCBs. Polychlorinated biphenyls are almost 100 years old. They are man-made and from the very beginning it was obvious they were very dangerous.
They were used for many years in capacitors, hydraulic fuels, wood floor finishes: clearly not something we want in the food chain. But almost from the early 1900s until 1966, when a Swedish scientist actually established their danger, people looked the other way and allowed them to be used, even though numerous industrial accidents happened over and over and over again.
But even once the science was in place it was really not until the 1970s – 1972 –before PCBs in public areas were banned; even then, they were still allowed to be used and their use was not fully banned until 2000. So there are a lot of PCBs out there and they were left out there almost 100 years after we knew there was a problem.
So, despite the Commission’s directive of 1996 which required the disposal of PCBs, we find them coming up again and again, in particular in Belgium and in Ireland recently.
But I have found that one thing really confused people in Ireland. I remember visiting a butcher around that time and he just could not understand. He said, we have put into place so much traceability. We can know exactly where this egg comes from, what day it was laid and if we really want to delve a little bit further we can find out exactly what farm and so on. And yet, even after we knew the source of the PCBs, this butcher, who sources all his own pork, who had all the code numbers etc. was still being forced to throw away and destroy pork.
I do not understand how that happened, because we have really worked so hard on the Committee on the Environment; you have worked so hard to achieve traceability, and yet when the chips were down, those systems were not used. Maybe they were used to find the farms, but they were not used to clear the reputations of the innocent and this cost people an awful lot – and it cost my country an awful lot, for it was not these particular supply chains, it was the whole country that was blackened.
And there is confusion about other things. We are talking today about PCBs and dioxins and rightly so, but are we going to spend 100 years before we realise the connection between dioxins and incineration? This is something that I am also constantly trying to do, namely to keep dioxins from incineration out of the food chain."@en1
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