Category: Backyard Talk

The threats that toxic waste sites pose to human and environmental health are serious and urgent, and research done on Superfund site cleanup has shown that proper cleanup can mitigate the risk of serious health issues and help revitalize ailing local economies.
However, the program went bankrupt after the Polluter Pays Fees expired in 1995. With limited funds the program has limped along for decades. Today we have a chance to pass legislation that would reinstate the polluters pays fees and protect public health and the environment through a robust clean-up plan.
The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), more commonly known as Superfund, was passed in 1980 in response to the Love Canal disaster in New York and the Valley of the Drums in Kentucky, with the ultimate purpose of addressing the serious threat to public health that toxic waste sites pose via cleanup of the sites; the entity responsible for seeing out this purpose is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There are three main ways in which cleanup can occur: (1) the party responsible for pollution is identified and then tasked with cleaning up the site, (2) the EPA cleans up the site using money from the established trust fund and then recovers the cost incurred from cleanup from the responsible party, and (3) in orphan sites – sites where the responsible party no longer exists or has been found to no longer be liable – the EPA pays for the cost using money from the established trust fund.
When CERCLA was initially enacted, this aforementioned trust fund was created using money collected from Polluter Pays Taxes – taxes that were imposed on oil and chemical companies. In 1995, Congress allowed these taxes to expire. As a result of this expiration, this trust fund (that had at one point generated almost $2 million per year between 1993 and 1995) was completely deplete of funds by 2003. Without Polluter Pays Taxes, the Superfund program has fallen into a financial shortage and become less effective at cleaning up sites. Additionally, the program has become reliant on taxpayer dollars for funding, with the GAO reporting that 80% of Superfund costs were funded by general revenue between 1999 and 2013.
This same GAO report also outlines the ways in which the Superfund program has suffered since the fund ran out of Polluter Pays Tax money. Between 1999 and 2003, there has been a 37% decline in number of remedial action completions, an 84% decline in number of construction completions, and a significant increase in time taken to complete each project (from 2.6 years to 4 years). Based on these findings, not only are taxpayers now paying for the Superfund program, but they are paying for a less efficient Superfund program.
This program is essential to cleaning up contaminated land and mitigating exposure to toxicants, and while Scott Pruitt’s EPA has made clear that they would like to give more focus to Superfund, it’s difficult to give the Superfund program the true attention it needs without proper financial backing. Many legislators have attempted to introduce bills that would reinstate Polluter Pays Taxes, however these attempts have been so far unsuccessful. The most recent attempt made by Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), entitled the Superfund Polluter Pays Restoration Act of 2017, would reinstate and raise the Hazardous Substance Superfund financing rate; no actions have been taken on this bill since its introduction.
It is urgent that everyone calls their legislators and ask them to support the Superfund program. Please take a moment today to contact your representatives and ask them to sign onto Senator Booker’s Superfund Polluter Pays Restoration Act of 2017 (S. 2198).
 

Water is the most fundamental unit of life, necessary for the survival of every organism on earth. Despite the importance of this essential molecule, water resources across the United States are not treated with the appropriate level of care and precaution to protect public health.
As one of the most wealthy and powerful countries in the world, with access to the most advanced technology in existence, it is reasonable to assume that the US would be able to provide all its citizens with safe, healthy drinking water. Events like the tragic water crisis in Flint, Michigan should be just an isolated outlier, an ultra-rare disaster in a system that otherwise takes every action possible to minimize exposure to toxic contaminants. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and throughout the country lead-contaminated drinking water is afflicting communities both large and small.
Major metropolitan areas such as Chicago, that required lead plumbing be used up until it was federally banned in 1986, still struggle with these issues, with a recent Chicago Tribune article citing over a hundred homes with lead levels exceeding the EPA’s 15 ppb action level. The issue is often even more pressing for smaller communities that may lack the funding to comprehensively address these water quality issues.
In a 2018 article from the New York Times, Maura Allaire, a University of California, Irvine assistant professor argues that smaller communities often “fly under the radar”, suffering from atrophied infrastructure and challenged to meet water quality and treatment standards. That same article cites research showing that in the year of 2015 only, up to 21,000,000 US citizens were at risk of exposure to dangerous lead levels.
Lead ingestion endangers most systems of the human body and can lead to kidney issues, reproductive problems, brain damage, and ultimately death. No amount of lead exposure is safe for humans, and even below the action level of 15 ppb set by the EPA, human health issues can occur, especially for pregnant women and children under the age of 6. At such critical stages of physical and mental development lead is even more hazardous, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends water below 1 ppb lead for young children.
Given the severity and pervasiveness of the issue, it would seem common-sense to protect America’s kids from lead poisoning. Only 7 states, however, require that schools even test for lead in their drinking water (California, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Maryland, Illinois and Virginia). While CHEJ is currently working to address this obvious political failure, there’s something that everyone can do. H.R. 5833, or the Get the Lead Out of Schools Act of 2017 is currently awaiting a decision in the House of Representatives. If you want to protect people from exposure to hazardous chemicals such as lead, contact your local representative and demand that they focus on this issue, and do their part to guarantee the safety of American children.
Take action and contact your representative to act on the Get the Lead of Schools Act.
 

The Superfund program has long lacked the funding required to remediate the hundreds of languishing sites that continue to endanger communities across the country. Scott Pruitt’s answer to this dilemma? Promoting redevelopment.
At face value, incentivizing the cleanup of contaminated land through redevelopment seems to be a win-win solution that protects human health and revitalizes the economies of local communities. However, there are many reasons to be skeptical of Pruitt’s strategies to achieve this outcome.
On July 25, 2017, the EPA published its most recent Superfund taskforce report. Lois Gibbs, Love Canal community leader and ‘Mother of Superfund’, was concerned by the report’s focus on redevelopment:
“Scott Pruitt’s Superfund Task Force Report almost entirely void of public health concerns.  In fact, the report only mentions health six times with four of those in the Executive Summary. The report sounds like a blueprint to involve for bankers, investors and developers and a plan for corporations to reduce cleanup costs and increase profits at the expense of public health. Redevelopment is mentioned 39 times.”
Third party investment in the cleanup and redevelopment of sites brings about a host of liability issues. In many cases, end-users purchase sites without taking on future liability and when Responsible Party cleanup is deemed complete they are often released from liability as well. However, in the cases where containment fails or cleanup later proves ineffective, such properties are left without a liable party, and become orphaned sites which must be remediated with taxpayer money.
Another tool which the EPA plans to use increasingly is environmental liability transfer, in which redevelopers purchase sites and take on the cleanup responsibility. However, this process does not always run smoothly: last june, the company Environmental Liability Transfers Inc. attempted to back out of a remediation agreement by suing the original responsible party. The previous owner, Detrex, denies ELT’s allegations that the company failed to fully disclose the extent of the site contamination:
“There are no takebacks in environmental liability transfer. This move undermines ELT’s core business model and could be a red flag for any deal they’ve done,” said Tom Mark, CEO of Detrex. “ELT was unsuccessful in its attempt to extract itself from its commitments to Detrex and has now resorted to a lawsuit full of restated history and invented facts.”
Pruitt’s prioritization for Superfund redevelopment recently made Bloomberg headlines over news that the EPA’s Superfund special accounts may now be used to persuade companies to buy and clean up contaminated sites. There is about $3.3 billion in EPA’s Superfund site special accounts as of this week, about three times the amount Congress has appropriated to the Superfund program for fiscal year 2018.
If redevelopment becomes the EPA’s new solution to expedite cleanups despite Superfund budget cuts, we have to ask ourselves several questions: How do we ensure robust liability, cleanup standards, community involvement, oversight, and enforcement? Furthermore, how are we going to clean the many sites which lack redevelopment potential, yet pose a dire health risk?
In the end, the only way to both finance the cleanups of orphan sites and decentivize the use of hazardous chemicals which cause Superfund sites in the first place is to reinstate the Polluter’s Pay tax. We need the EPA to fulfill its true mission in protecting human health and the environment, not polluting corporations.

The Trump administration’s 2019 budget (October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019) has serious consequences for the protection of the environment and of people. Trump’s budget plan cuts the Environmental Protection Agency’s spending by 23 percent, eliminating dozens of programs. The agency’s budget for the Office of Science and Technology is being nearly halved, while the Human Health Risk Assessment program will face reductions close to 40 percent. Other programs, such as several voluntary emissions-reductions programs and climate change research initiatives, will be eliminated.
The Superfund program, while considered to be a priority by EPA Administrator Scott Pruit, will still be subject to 25 percent cuts. Pruitt’s statement on the Superfund program emphasizes that cuts will come from administrative costs and the expedition of cleanups. The EPA’s other hazardous site restoration project, known as Brownfields, will shrink by 36 percent.
Trump’s cuts to several important EPA programs and subsequent shrinking of the agency as a whole sends a strong message about his regard for environmental health of Americans. Many environmentalists consider this move towards less health protective policies to be dangerous. The administration is instead prioritizing military and defense spending, hashing out 686 billion to the Department of Defense.
Aside from cuts, the Trump administration announced the end of the Clinton-era “once in, always in” policy on pollution. Environmental activists and lawyers are criticizing this move, warning that it could increase exposure to hazardous air pollutions, particularly among vulnerable populations. Former environmental justice head of the EPA, Mustafa Ali, said in an interview with Earther, “[The elimination of the ‘once in, always in’ policy is] really going to be killing people. You’re going to have all types of public health problems.”
These concerns being raised are valid, as the lack of funding to crucial programs mean that the most vulnerable of populations will be most affected. Considering that our president is ignoring the pressing issue of climate change, we must take matters in our own hands. More than ever, we need to work to protect our communities from the threat of pollution and toxic contamination. By supporting local groups that are putting pressure on government officials to produce life-saving policies, you can make sure that your community is safe and healthy.