50th Anniversary of Michigan PBB Crisis

A coalition of institutions, including Alma College, Central Michigan University, Emory University, and the Pine River Superfund Task Force have won grant support from the Michigan Humanities Council to hold a series of events in 2022-2023 to commeorate and learn the lessons of the Michigan PBB Crisis. The crisis began with a careless shipping error in May 1973 that introduced a flame retardant composed of polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) into the state’s food chain, eventually being consumed by at least 8 million people.

During the coming year, especiallally with a confrenece in Alma-St. Louis on May 18, - May 20, 2023, members of the public are invited to join with international experts to discuss the lessons of the crisis and what can be done to correct the lingering effects on human health and the environment. More importantly, we want to learn from this accident, which has been copied repeatedly since in other exposures to widely distributed toxins. We invite you to mark your calenders and plan to join us in May 2023. Updated information will be added here as the schedule is finalized.

Here is one of the many images from the PBB crisis showing the bodies of some of the 30,000 dairy cattle that had to be destroyed as a result of the PBB shipping error. Here is an image of dead cows shot because of PBB and awaiting burial. We can’t forget this mistake.