From 1955 until 1977, the Sangamo Weston plant in Pickens, South Carolina, used PCBs to manufacture capacitors, and dumped 400,000 pounds of PCB contaminated wastewater into the Twelve Mile Creek. In 1990, the EPA declared the  site of the capacitor plant, its landfills and the polluted watershed, which stretches nearly  downstream to Lake Hartwell as a Superfund site. Two dams on the Twelve Mile Creek are to be removed and on Feb. 22, 2011 the first of two dams began to be dismantled. Some contaminated sediment is being removed from the site and hauled away, while other sediment is pumped into a series of settling ponds.
In 2013, the state environmental regulators issued a rare emergency order, banning all sewage sludge from being land applied or deposited on landfills, as it contained very high levels of PCBs. The problem had not been discovered until thousands of acres of farm land in the state had been contaminated by the hazardous sludge. A criminal investigation to determine the perpetrator of this crime was launched.