Category: Superfund News

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. on Tuesday introduced legislation to renew a federal tax on the oil and chemical industries to fund the cleanup of Superfund sites, of which New Jersey has more than any other state.

“Superfund sites threaten public and environmental health in New Jersey and across the country, and those sites could be cleaned up faster with adequate funding,” said Pallone, D-6th Dist., who outlined his plan during a Zoom press conference.

Pallone, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee with jurisdiction over the issue, said he was proposing the legislation in response to President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.
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Photo Credit: Jersey Journal

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

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

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

Hazardous waste sites are scattered all across the country, from a Brooklyn canal once surrounded by chemical plants to a shuttered garbage incineration facility in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
There are more than 1,300 of these spots in all — dubbed “Superfund sites” by the federal government — where toxic chemicals from factories and landfills were dumped for decades, polluting the surrounding soil, water and air.
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Photo Credit: EPA

NAVASSA, N.C. (SBG) — Millions of Americans live near Superfund sites, areas the federal government considers contaminated as a result of hazardous waste that was dumped, mismanaged or otherwise left out in the open. Many of those sites are still awaiting cleanup. And with climate change triggering sea-level rise, experts are ringing the alarm bell about the threat of flooding at Superfund sites, which could put the communities that surround them at risk.

Texas’ deep freeze was the latest warning that extreme weather events threaten to derail efforts to clean up the most toxic sites in the US. In a worst-case scenario, a natural disaster can unleash buried toxic substances. But even minimal damage or the mere threat of a storm can stop or slow cleanup efforts.

That vulnerability could become a bigger problem as climate change brings about more weather-related disasters. For years, experts have pushed the Environmental Protection Agency to prepare for the onslaught.

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Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

History will record that Abraham Browning first christened New Jersey “The Garden State” in 1876.
But if such hokey nicknames had been distributed at any point in the last 40 years, my ancestral home might be The Superfund State. With roughly 150 toxic waste sites and only 35 deemed adequately cleaned up, Jersey is outpacing larger, more populous states like California and New York.
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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons