Chlordecone
banned organochlorine compound used as pesticide
Chlordecone, better known in the United States under the brand name Kepone, is an organochlorine compound and a colourless solid. It is an obsolete insecticide, now prohibited in the Western world, but only after many thousands of tonnes had been produced and used. Chlordecone is a known persistent organic pollutant that was banned globally by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2009.
Synthesis
Chlordecone is made by dimerizing hexachlorocyclopentadiene and hydrolyzing to a ketone.
It is also the main degradation product of mirex.
History
In the U.S., chlordecone, commercialized under the brand name "Kepone", was produced by Allied Signal Company and LifeSciences Product Company in Hopewell, Virginia. The improper handling and dumping of the substance (including the waste materials generated in its manufacturing process) into the nearby James River (U.S.) in the 1960s and 1970s drew national attention to its toxic effects on humans and wildlife. After two physicians, Dr. Yi-nan Chou and Dr. Robert S. Jackson of the Virginia Health Department, notified the Centers for Disease Control that employees of the company had been found to have toxic chemical poisoning, LifeSciences closed its plant on 4 July 1975, and cleanup of the contamination began.
The public source identifies “Chlordecone” as banned organochlorine compound used as pesticide. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chlordecone, banned and organochlorine.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q423892. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chlordecone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.