Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced an $80 million settlement with the Monsanto Company Thursday that “forces the company to pay for the long-standing environmental damage it knowingly caused in Ohio with its toxic products.”
“Ohio has been absorbing the health and environmental costs of PCB contamination for decades, and the cleanup will likely continue for even longer,” Attorney General Dave Yost said. “This settlement not only holds Monsanto accountable for its actions but also provides significant financial resources to assist in environmental cleanup.”
Monsanto “manufactured Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) for use in industrial and commercial products from 1935 until 1977, the only U.S. company to do so before the government banned the dangerous substances in 1979,” Yost’s office said. PCBs are hydrophobic substances able to accumulate in organic materials, including plastic pellets that were widely banned in 1979 after being linked to health risks in humans and to environmental harm, according to the NIH National Library of Medicine.
As stated in the lawsuit, the State of Ohio sued Monsanto for “the damage caused by PCBs in the environment, groundwater, stormwater, stormwater and wastewater drainage systems, waterbodies, sediment, soil, air, vapor, natural resources, fish and/or wildlife within the State.” The suit, filed in 2018, maintained that the company had known for decades that it created products with harmful levels of PCBs.
Monsanto was purchased by the German conglomerate Bayer in 2018 shortly after the state filed its lawsuit, the Attorney General’s office notes.
In a statement shared with The Ohio Star, a Bayer spokesman noted that the while the agreement “will resolve all of the state’s claims regarding PCBs” in the Buckeye State, it “contains no admission of liability by the company.”
The Bayer spox added, “Monsanto legally manufactured PCBs until voluntarily ceasing their production in 1977, two years before the EPA banned their manufacture. Widely recognized as nonflammable safety fluids, PCBs were once required by many electrical and building codes as well as insurance companies to protect against serious fire risk. The company never manufactured PCBs in Ohio or discharged PCBs into Ohio waterways.”
The settlement comes after “extended litigation by Yost’s Environmental Enforcement Section, with the money being placed in Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accounts specifically designated to mitigate future environmental hazards,” the attorney general’s office said.
A stipulation has been filed in federal court requesting remand of the case to the Hamilton County Common Pleas Court where the settlement will be submitted for judicial approval. In addition, the settlement funds will be used to establish an environmental advisory board to determine how the funds are to be best utilized across the state.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Dave Yost” by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. Background Photo “Monsanto” by Karen Eliot. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include a statement shared with The Ohio Star from the Bayer corporation about the settlement with the state of Ohio.
