Posted on February 5, 2025
An archaic manufacturing chemical is still present in much of the river despite years of remediation
Fishing spots dot the banks of the 300-mile-long Hudson River, from the Adirondacks to New York City. These sites, many of which are marked by roadside pull-offs or small trailheads, are not usually where you’ll find scientists. But in the summer of 2021, Sam Byrne, a professor at Middlebury College, set out with his team to visit each site, chatting with clusters of fishermen to find out what drove them to the water.
Many of these areas are missing one key thing that more formal docks and boat launches along the Hudson have: a small yellow sign, advising residents to proceed with caution before eating the fish. The river is heavily contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a class of now-illegal manufacturing chemicals that are known to cause cancer and other diseases. The signs, put in place by the state EPA, are one of the few lines of defense protecting New Yorkers from consuming toxic fish.
Despite the dangers, some anglers continue to fish from the river, seeking sustenance—and community. “There was definitely a proportion of people who said, ‘I know that this river is polluted. I know that you shouldn’t eat the fish. I do it anyway because I’ve been doing it my whole life,’” Byrne said. “That right there, I think, is some evidence of poor communication from the powers that be.”
The water’s troubles started when General Electric began dumping PCBs into the Hudson, just north of Albany, in the 1940s. By the time the state shut down GE’s facilities nearly 30 years later, the company had dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the river, sparking calls for GE to fund river cleanup. In 1984, the EPA designated the Hudson River as a Superfund site—a class of highly polluted sites across the country that the agency sees as requiring close federal oversight—but little immediate action was taken. Then, from 2009 to 2015, the EPA dredged a few key parts of the upper Hudson in one of the largest dredging projects in the nation. Officials hoped that removing contaminated sediments from the river would help reduce PCB concentrations to safer levels.
However, recent EPA data shows PCB levels are still dangerously high. And despite mounting evidence of the river’s continued toxicity, the agency is holding off on deciding whether more cleanup is needed, opting to collect more data. “To just make a decision now, without being well founded in the science yet—it’s not something that we want to do,” said Gary Klawinski, the EPA’s director of the Hudson River Superfund Site.
As river recovery rates begin to plateau, some residents and former administrators are questioning the agency’s methods. To these critics, the existing data sends a clear message: The Hudson River is still heavily polluted. They believe more dredging is needed to keep the Hudson Valley’s 3.5 million residents safe.
Five-year review reveals contamination is still high
The EPA released its latest report on pollution in the Hudson River in January. As with all of its Superfund sites, the agency updates the public on its monitoring work by publishing a report on the river’s status every five years.
While scientists and local activists have tracked PCB concentrations in fish and sediments since the release of the previous EPA report in 2019, it was the data from the initial draft of the 2025 report—and the EPA’s decision to hold off on enacting further cleanup—that sparked a renewed outcry from environmentalists and policymakers. Many of these stakeholders have followed the river’s recovery for decades.
Upon completion of dredging in 2015, the agency set a PCB concentration goal of 0.05 parts per million in fish—a safe enough level to allow someone to consume a half-pound meal of local fish once per week—to indicate a full river recovery. While this is just a small trace of the chemical, PCBs break down very slowly, so ingesting even tiny amounts can be harmful over time, especially to pregnant people and children.
The agency projected that PCB concentrations would drop to 0.4 ppm by 2020, making it safe to eat local fish once every two months. By 2030, these concentrations were expected to reach 0.2 ppm. Until PCBs drop to these levels, the current “take no fish, eat no fish” advisories for the upper Hudson will remain in place.
The recent report revealed that, as of 2021, the average Hudson River fish still had a PCB concentration of 0.71 ppm. This number dropped to 0.58 ppm in 2022, representing some progress. But in certain fish species, such as catfish, these concentrations are nearly 2 ppm. The same goes for certain “hot spots” in the river, stretches where PCB levels in fish and sediments are far above average.
“It’s sort of a mixed recovery, which we always expected to happen. But it is a bit challenging,” Klawinski said. “When you make a decision about whether they’re going down at the rate that’s acceptable to us, you need to have a certain degree of statistical reliability, and we’re getting very close to that.”
For fish concentrations, the EPA holds that eight or more years of data would be needed to establish a “meaningful time trend.” While PCB concentrations were initially expected to decline by 7 to 9 percent each year, the agency still tracks any declines that surpass 5 percent, noting that “as time progresses, these rates of recovery were expected to decline.”
The EPA isn’t necessarily wrong to wait for more data, said Byrne, who detailed his visits to riverside fishing sites in a study of fish consumption advisory compliance. But there still “hasn’t been a substantial decrease in PCB concentrations,” he noted.
“Perhaps the full benefit of the dredging is not apparent yet,” Byrne said. “It is also possible that the dredging didn’t work right, that it just isn’t going to reduce PCB concentrations to a level that was expected. There are other lines of evidence that would suggest that that is the case.”
Administrators split on need for future cleanup
For residents of riverfront towns along the Hudson, pollution in the river is a threat to both their diet and livelihood, said Roger Downs of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter.
“When you have the dumping of a forever chemical like this, and there’s no instant cleanup, and there’s no real decision as to who are the victims that need to be compensated, and it lingers for decades—I think it’s very difficult to get justice,” Downs said. “This moment in time could be a crucial turning point for the Hudson if there was the political will to finish the cleanup, once and for all.”
This message is all too familiar for New York State officials. In the years since dredging concluded, tensions have flared between state and federal agencies over whether to enact a more comprehensive cleanup strategy. In 2019, the state sued the EPA for issuing a “certificate of completion” to General Electric for the cleanup, which the state alleged was still incomplete. Though the lawsuit was dismissed, the state still has the power to “come after the company with the full force of the law to see the job done,” the decision reads.
“We originally envisioned that there would be significant drop-offs in contamination over the first several years,” said Basil Seggos, who served as commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation from 2015 to 2024. “But then hearing that the river would take decades to recover, largely relying on natural [recovery] … that’s ultimately a failure on the federal government’s part.”
In a statement, the state DEC said it is “committed to working with the EPA to fully assess and develop further actions to hold [General Electric] accountable for fully addressing unacceptable levels of contamination that remain in the river.”
With a decision from the EPA still in limbo, some advocates have been tracking the river’s recovery themselves. Pete Lopez, who served as EPA Region 2 administrator at the time of the lawsuit, left his post after President Biden took office in 2021 and now works with environmental advocacy group Scenic Hudson. “There’s some migration of [PCBs], and the contamination levels remain unacceptably high,” Lopez said of the data released in January’s report.
Althea Mullarkey, a project analyst at Scenic Hudson, said the group had previously predicted that PCB concentrations were still far above the EPA’s 2020 benchmark of 0.4 ppm in fish. And with the agency expecting annual recovery rates to decline, Mullarkey fears the river won’t be able to hit its 2030 benchmarks.
Klawinski, from the EPA, said these benchmarks are suggestions and not reaching them in time isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. A General Electric spokesperson told Sierra that “the Hudson River dredging project removed the vast majority of PCBs from the Upper Hudson, led to broad declines in PCB levels, and is on track to deliver further improvements.”
In January, the EPA announced it would issue an official decision on whether to enact further cleanup efforts by 2027 at the latest. Funding for the signage posted along the river, which comes from a grant from GE, expires in 2026, and state officials remain unsure whether it will be renewed.
With or without official cleanup efforts, the tradition of fishing from the Hudson River will likely remain alive, for better or worse. Aaron Mair, a former New York Department of Health official and Sierra Club president, is one of millions of people who relied on the river while growing up in the Hudson Valley.
“There were very few places communities of color could go and recreate and just be in community,” Mair said, reflecting on his experience growing up in the Hudson Valley during the late 1960s. “As a Black person or a Hispanic person from the Hudson River Valley, you would go down to the river. It was one of the few places that you could enjoy.… What happens when your culture, customs, and heritage put you at a unique risk of exposure to pollution?”
