Michael Sheen investigates Wales' toxic PCB legacy as cancer clusters emerge

Michael Phillips grew up in the 1980s doing what children do—playing outdoors without fear. At a lagoon near Ruabon in Wrexham, he and his friends shot air guns at rusted barrels, watching clouds of colored powder drift into the air. They had no idea what was inside those barrels. They had no reason to think the powder was anything but harmless.

Decades later, Phillips developed a rare shoulder cancer. His surgeon, after forty years in practice, told him he had never seen this particular type before. Around the same time, several of Phillips' childhood friends fell ill. One died of breast cancer. Another died of brain cancer. A third lost all his lymph glands to cancer. Another developed the exact same shoulder cancer Phillips had—so rare that his surgeon said the odds of two people in the same neighborhood contracting it were like winning the lottery every single day for six months. It was not a coincidence.

The source of the contamination was the lagoon itself. In 1981, a fire at the site took sixty firefighters more than eighteen hours to extinguish. The effects were felt up to twenty miles away. What burned that day, and what had been dumped there for years, were polychlorinated biphenyls—PCBs—chemicals so toxic and so persistent that they have become known as "forever chemicals." They do not break down easily. They accumulate in the environment, in animals, in fish, and in human bodies. Once inside you, they stay.

A researcher named Douglas Gowan spent years trying to warn the world about this. Gowan, a former farming consultant turned whistleblower, identified fourteen contaminated sites across the UK, twelve of them in Wales. He alleged that Monsanto, the chemical giant, had deliberately dumped "huge amounts of industrial chemicals" across the country. Gowan died before his warnings were taken seriously. But months before his death, he spoke to actor Michael Sheen, who has now continued the investigation in a BBC documentary. "What he told me made my blood run cold," Sheen said.

The history is damning. Monsanto knew about PCB toxicity as early as 1949—internal company documents prove it. The chemicals were useful: stable, resistant to heat and pressure, excellent insulators. They went into plastics, paint, electrical equipment, even lipsticks. But by the 1970s, bans began rolling out worldwide as the health risks became undeniable. Monsanto's response was not to stop production. It was to move it. The company had been dumping PCBs into waterways in Anniston, Alabama until 1993, when the entire town sued and won a $300 million settlement. But by then, Monsanto had already begun shifting operations. In 1972, internal memos show the company decided PCBs were a worldwide problem and an environmental danger—and simultaneously proposed increasing capacity at their Newport plant in Wales to produce five million more kilograms. The UK government, unlike the United States, imposed no restrictions on importing PCBs. Hundreds of tonnes arrived.

The choice of Wales was strategic. As one attorney involved in the Anniston case noted, Monsanto targeted "working people" who "wouldn't be able to fight back." A whistleblower later observed that the company seemed to choose places where chronic health issues could hide behind pre-existing industrial contamination—coal mining regions, heavy industry zones where people already expected the air and water to be dirty. Wales fit perfectly.

When Sheen had his own blood tested, it contained eighty-one different types of PCBs, despite never having lived near a dump site. Phillips' blood showed higher-than-average levels. There is no safe level of PCBs. The lower your exposure, the lower your cancer risk. But everyone now carries traces of these chemicals. We all have skin in the game.

The legal response has been inadequate. Wrexham council said cleanup would cost around forty-five million pounds and bankrupt the authority. Later investigations concluded the sites did not meet the legal threshold for mandatory remediation, despite the presence of cyanide, arsenic, and PCBs. The Welsh government has now promised a nationwide strategy to address over nine thousand potential contaminated sites identified in 2015. But promises and action remain separated by years, by bureaucracy, by the simple fact that forever chemicals do not care about legal thresholds. They are already in the soil, the water, and the blood of everyone who lives there.