Washington Business Spring 2017 | Washington Business | Page 15

washington business EPA Celebrates Boeing’s Duwamish Waterway Clean-up Efforts The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) celebrated Boeing’s clean-up efforts in the Lower Duwamish Waterway (LDW) as part of their 40 years of protection, prevention and preservation. Over the last decade, Boeing has combined with other “early-action” work on the water- way. As a result, Polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, sediment has been reduced by 50 per- cent in the area that was previously home to Boeing’s Plant 2, which manufactured B-17 bombers during World War II. It was demol- ished in 2011. Boeing has also transformed more than a half mile of industrial waterfront back into natural shoreline, providing refuge and food sources for fish and wildlife, Boeing said. In 2015, Boeing completed sediment cleanup on approximately a one-mile span of the LDW. The cleanup removed 265,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment and bank soil from the waterway and shoreline — enough to fill 4,000 rail cars — Boeing reported. Now, more than 170,000 native plants occupy more than 5 acres of shoreline. Their effort was the largest of the early cleanup actions of the Lower Duwamish Group, which includes King County, the Port of Seattle and the City of Seattle. Boeing has worked with the EPA and state Department of Ecology to coordinate its water- way cleanup and habitat restoration. For more information on Boeing’s efforts in the LDW cleanup, visit the website at boeing.com. Report: CTE Students Find Better Paying Jobs Out of School Washington high school graduates who do not attend college are more likely to land a living-wage job or apprenticeship if they have taken career and technical education (CTE) courses. This information was made possible by a December 2016 state audit released with data