ENVIRONMENT | Protecting our natural resources
12 March 2008
The Superfund Helps Clean Up Hazardous Waste
In 1980, 10 years after the first Earth Day, the U.S. Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which authorized the “Superfund,” the federal government’s program to clean up the nation’s uncontrolled hazardous waste sites. It has allowed the federal government to help cities and states clean up the nation’s most dangerous toxic waste sites.
To do this, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) works closely with communities, potentially responsible parties (polluters), scientists, researchers, contractors, and state, local, tribal, and other federal authorities. Working with these groups, EPA identifies hazardous waste sites, tests the conditions of the sites, formulates cleanup plans, and begins cleaning up identified sites.
New sites are added each year; some sites deleted from the list have been put back on the list for further cleanup. Controversies exist about its funding mechanism, its definition of “cleanup,” and other issues. Still, Superfund is the first program in the world to tackle a country’s 150-year industrial legacy and to make those responsible for the waste pay to clean it up.
Before Superfund
Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York. In the 1970s, the neighborhood had a high rate of cancer cases and birth defects. Local schoolchildren constantly were ill. The residents eventually discovered that a nearby canal was a toxic chemical dumping site. By 1978, Love Canal had drawn national media attention, and newspaper articles were calling the neighborhood “a public health time bomb.”
The same year — because there was no other legal way for the federal government to help the state of New York with an environmental problem — then-President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency at Love Canal.
Eventually, the government relocated more than 800 families and reimbursed them for their homes. The polluter’s parent corporation, Occidental Petroleum, spent more than $200 million to clean up the site, and Congress passed the law establishing Superfund in 1980.
Superfund Today
According to Katherine Probst, senior fellow and director of Risk, Resource, and Environmental Management at Resources for the Future (an environmental policy research group in Washington, D.C.), “Most of corporate America is much more aware of the costs of not managing hazardous substances well, and Superfund liability [for polluters] has had a huge deterrent effect.” Seventy percent of cleanups, she added, are paid for directly by responsible parties.
Superfund liability, Probst said, “does provide a very clear and very real incentive to manage hazardous substances properly. And that is really the purpose of a liability system, so in that sense it has been hugely effective.”
