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Module 1 |
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CERCLA/SARA
EPA's Superfund office administers the laws and regulations regarding wastes that have been deposited in the past - our past sins, so to say.
Read the CERCLA Overview from the EPA's web site.
Superfund Reform and Reauthorization:
The provision that allows to collect the Superfund tax from the industry ran out in December 1995. Since that time no money is coming into the fund. There have been many attempts in congress to pass a Superfund Reauthorization and Amendment Law, but so far nothing has happened.
| 2004 was the first year that all of EPA's cost for Superfund cleanup came from the General Fund. There are no funds left in the “Superfund”. |
A compromise between industry, EPA, environmental and public health groups and the Republican and Democratic parties could never be worked out. In the more than 20 years that CERCLA has been around it has changed a lot. Due to the fact that no reauthorization or reform bill could pass Congress, EPA has tried to reform the way Superfund is administered, in order to respond to criticisms from many sides (Superfund Reforms).
There are several reasons why industry is unhappy with the superfund law:
- There is a provision ("joint and several liability") that made it possible to have one polluter of the waste site shoulder the whole cleanup costs, if only one item of waste could be identified to belong to that polluter.
- In the days when these landfills operated, it was completely legal and an accepted practice to dump industrial waste there. Now industries feel they are being punished for doing something that was legal.
On the other hand, the public health advocates and environmental interest groups have many other criticisms: clean up is not fast enough, not thorough enough, public health is in many more sites at risk, especially on many sites that are not on the NPL.
NPL - The National Priority List
How a site makes it onto the NPL.
The Superfund Site from EPA offers many information about sites that are on the NPL. Currently there are about 1300 sites on the NPL, but this number changes from month to month. NPL sites are uncontrolled and/or abandoned sites, that are contaminated in such a way, that they pose a threat human health or the environment. The reasons why a site poses such a risk vary: often groundwater contamination threatens a drinking water supply, sometimes inhalation exposure is present, sometimes there is a fire or explosion risk.
1/3 of the NPL sites are ex-landfills, often so-called co-disposal landfills: where municipal and industrial waste was deposited. Other types of NPL sites are "brownfields" - contaminated, urban sites. Other NPL sites were used for chemical and weapon manufacturing or as storage facilities. There are also unusual ones, like the 192 miles of the Hudson River that are contaminated with PCBs.
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Find a map of New York State with all NPL sites on it. |
Top ten substances found at NPL sites based on occurrence, toxicity, exposure potential.
- Lead
- Arsenic
- Mercury
- Vinyl chloride
- Benzene
- Cadmium
- Poychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs have their own homepage at EPA – they are regulated under TSCA, not RCRA!)
- Chloroform
- benzo[a]pyrene
- tricholoroethylene (TCE)
To find a specific NPL site, you can also use the CERCLIS database. The sites on the NPL make up only 3.25% of the 40,000 uncontrolled HWS that have been reported to the federal agencies (reference). Clean up of the non-NPL sites may be faster (because they are not so contaminated) or it may be much slower - because no Superfund money can be used for those sites.
A review of Superfund's progress by the General Accounting Office in 1999 reported, that at 595 sites (from 1231) - or 48% - of the NPL sites, the cleanup was either finished or all remedies were in place. It takes app. 8-10 years for a site to reach that status. Keep in mind that these are often large areas with complex contamination, that took a long time to get contaminated to such a degree that it earned them a place on the NPL. Another reason why clean up takes so long is the time and money spent on litigation to identify the parties responsible for the pollution and for the cleanup, and to make them pay. It is estimated, that one out of every four Dollars spent on Superfund cleanup, is spent on litigation.
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Module 1
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