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Blumenauer Introduces Legislation to Reinstate Superfund Taxes; End 25-Year Polluter Tax Holiday That Slowed Toxic Cleanup

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, introduced the Superfund Reinvestment Act to require polluters to pay for the cleanup of toxic and hazardous waste sites throughout the United States.
For nearly three decades, petrochemical industry polluters have enjoyed environmental liability protections without paying into the Superfund Trust Fund, which has depleted the fund, unfairly shifted costs to taxpayers, and brought some Superfund cleanup efforts to a near stop. The legislation introduced by Blumenauer would reinstate this tax, something that President Biden identified as a top priority as part of a major infrastructure package.
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Photo Credit: The Skanner Archives

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Backyard Talk

PFAS Contamination in California

By: Leia Ku Cheng Yee, Communications and Development Intern
Since I have been living in California for 5 years, and have only been drinking tap water, I have always wondered if the water is safe for every Californian. Although I am a tap water advocate, and a firm believer that plastic bottled water is negatively impacting the environment, it is also significant to point out that not all individuals have the privilege to enjoy clean water. 
After listening to Andrea Amico’s story about the PFAS contamination at the Pease International Tradeport, I did some research and discovered that more than 300 drinking water wells in California have traces of chemicals, including PFAS, that is linked to cancer. I was shocked after reading about it in the Los Angeles Times, because most Californians are unaware that they are drinking traces of chemicals. Although they are concentrated largely in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, contaminated wells are found statewide, in rural as well as urban areas. 
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist indefinitely and accumulate in our bodies. Children and mothers are the most vulnerable to this chemical, and it can affect their reproductive and developmental health. PFAS also has been traced to kidney and testicular cancer, as well as high cholesterol and thyroid disease. It is a key ingredient in firefighting foam used in military bases, and has become a major component of groundwater pollution. But the chemicals are everywhere, hard to break down, and expensive to clean up. To learn more about PFAS, visit http://chej.org/toxictuesdays/.
Some utilities have treated the water to remove most of the chemicals, while others have started blending contaminated water with other sources to lower their concentration. Now, the new state law has required water providers to notify customers if the level of PFAS exceeds the threshold. But, it is not enough. Although the ultimate solution is to clean up, funding is scarce, and it is simply too costly to treat or replace the contaminated water. To cover the costs, water providers across California have begun what legal experts suspect could become a flood of lawsuits. 
Moreover, PFAS contamination in California is also an environmental justice issue. On any given day, one million Californians lack access to safe and affordable drinking water. Low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately harmed by this drinking water crisis, which affects hundreds of small, primarily rural communities across the state. In many cases, these communities lack the collective resources to pay for the high costs of treating or replacing contaminated water. It is not unusual for low-income residents to pay upwards of 10 percent of their income for safe water. 

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Homepage News Archive

Where Are the Lead Pipes? Finding Them May Prove Tough for EPA

Newly appointed Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland has pledged to address the concerns of U.S. communities that have disproportionately suffered from pollution and environmental degradation. In her role as the primary steward of America’s public lands, Haaland promised last week to incorporate diverse perspectives and prioritize environmental justice across the agencies of the Department of the Interior. In a secretarial order announced on Friday, the secretary said that these approaches would be integral to the department’s renewed focus on climate change.
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Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

Live Near a ‘Superfund’ Site? Your Life Span Might Be Shorter

MONDAY, April 19, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Living near a Superfund hazardous waste site may shorten your life, new research suggests.

There are thousands of Superfund sites across the United States and they include manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mines where hazardous waste was dumped, left out in the open or poorly managed, posing a risk to the environment and human health.
In this study, researchers analyzed 2018 U.S. Census data and found that overall, life expectancy for people who live near Superfund sites is about two months shorter than normal.
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Photo Credit: Patrick Bloodgood/US Army
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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

For 25 Years, Taxpayers Picked Up Polluters’ Superfund Bill. That May Finally Change.

For 15 years, the industries responsible for the nation’s worst toxic pollution helped pay into a federal trust for cleaning up waste sites through special taxes on petroleum, chemical components and corporate income. That program became known as “Superfund.”
But in 1995, the Republican-led Congress allowed those taxes to expire. They have never been reinstated, and the money for fixing many of the most noxious public health hazards in the U.S. has come entirely from taxpayers. That funding has dwindled, creating a lengthy cleanup backlog and leaving poor communities and fragile ecosystems exposed to deadly pollutants.
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Photo Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

‘There’s No Memory of the Joy.’ Why 40 Years of Superfund Work Hasn’t Saved Tar Creek

One of the first Superfund sites in the United States remains one of the most polluted.
From the late 1800s through the 1960s, miners extracted lead and zinc from the ground beneath the Tar Creek area in northeastern Oklahoma. But 50 years after the mine was shuttered, the region’s toxic legacy still seeps from boreholes into the water and drifts in the wind from tailings piles. Even now, the unstable ground threatens to swallow up homes.
Neighboring residents — including those of the Quapaw Nation and Ottawa County’s other eight tribes — have paid a heavy toll. The mounting environmental and human health threats led the federal government to declare 40 square miles of the area a Superfund site in 1984.
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Photo Credit: Clifton Adcock/The Frontier

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Fossil Fuel Racism

Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — lie at the heart of the crises we face, including public health, racial injustice, and climate change. This report synthesizes existing research and provides new analysis that finds that the fossil fuel industry contributes to public health harms that kill hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. each year and disproportionately endanger Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. President Joe Biden and the 117th Congress have a historic opportunity to improve public health, tackle the climate crisis, and confront systemic racism at the same time by phasing out fossil fuel production and use.
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Photo Credit: Les Stone/Greenpeace

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‘This is environmental racism’ How a protest in a North Carolina farming town sparked a national movement

Ben Chavis was driving on a lonely road through rolling tobacco fields when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the state trooper.

Chavis knew he was a marked man. Protests had erupted over North Carolina’s decision to dump 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in a poor Black farming community in Warren County, and Chavis was a leader of the revolt. The trooper pulled him over.

“What did I do, officer?” Chavis asked that day in 1982. The answer shocked him.

“He told me that I was driving too slow.”

Chavis was arrested and thrown in jail. When the cell door slammed shut, he gripped the metal bars and declared: “This is racism. This is environmental racism.”

The term stuck, and now — nearly 40 years after Chavis spoke the words that have come to define decisions by governments and corporations to place toxic pollution in communities of color — the issue has risen from the fringes of the American conservation movement to the heart of President Biden’s environmental agenda.

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Photo Credit: Ricky Stilley

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Can a wildlife refuge help a community’s fight for environmental justice?

Albuquerque’s South Valley was once a thriving oasis of food production watered by a network of historic irrigation canals, or acequias. Today it’s home to several historic neighborhoods along the Rio Grande including Mountain View.

After much of the area was rezoned in the 1960s, the residents, who are mainly Chicanos as well as recent immigrants, came under siege by the structural forces of environmental racism that dictate who lives near polluters and who doesn’t. Mountain View was soon enveloped by industry — auto recyclers, Albuquerque’s sewage plant, paint facilities, and fertilizer suppliers — that left a legacy of contaminated groundwater, two Superfund sites and high levels of air pollution.
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Photo Credit: Gabriela Campos/High Country News

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Backyard Talk

Environmental Justice for Overburdened Communities: A View from New Jersey

 Last year, the New Jersey state legislature passed a landmark environmental justice bill that requires the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to identify overburdened communities in the state and to evaluate whether facilities seeking operating permits pose a   disproportionate, cumulative environmental impact on these communities. Facilities located in the same census tract as overburdened communities are subject to this requirement and include facilities that are major sources of air pollution (as defined under the Clean Air Act); resource recovery facilities or incinerators; sludge processing facilities, combustors, or incinerators; sewage treatment plants with capacity over 50 million gallons per day; and certain kinds of landfills.
This important piece of legislation was signed into law by the governor making New Jersey the first state to require a mandatory denial of a permit for new facilities and to impose conditions on renewal and expansion permits for existing facilities based on environmental justice (EJ) concerns alone. A new permit will be denied for facilities “where an [EJ] analysis determines a facility will have a disproportionately negative impact on overburdened communities.”
An overburdened community is defined in this bill as any census block group that fulfills at least one of the following criteria:

  • At least 35% of households qualify as low-income
  • At least 40% of residents identify as minority or as members of a tribal community
  • At least 40% of households have limited English proficiency

A low-income household is one that is at or below twice the poverty threshold (determined annually by the US Census Bureau)
A household with limited English proficiency is one where no adult speaks English “very well,” according to the US Census Bureau.
The bill requires that a company that wants a permit for a new facility, an expansion of a facility, or a permit renewal for an existing facility and if that facility is located partially or completely in an overburdened community, then the company must do the following three things:

  1. Write an environmental justice impact statement that evaluates the unavoidable potential environmental and health impacts associated with the facility and  the environmental and health impacts already affecting the overburdened community.
  1. Provide the environmental justice impact statement to government entities and the Community.
  1. Hold a public hearing no sooner than 60 days after providing the environmental justice impact statement:
    • The public hearing must be publicized in at least two newspapers that serve the community (including one non-English language newspaper).
    • The notice of the public hearing must include: description of the proposed facility, summary of the impact statement, date/time/location of the hearing, address at which community members can submit written comments.
    • The state Department of Environmental Protection will post the impact statement and the information about the public hearing on its website.

At the hearing the company “shall provide clear, accurate and complete information.”
For a full text of the bill, go to: https://legiscan.com/NJ/text/S232/2020