June 22, 2006

The Cost of Superfund Neglect

Again, no one's cleaning it up. Those sites are two of the thousands of toxic waste facilities on the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL), created by Congress in 1980—a short while after Love Canal, a town built atop a toxic waste dump, was discovered by the media. Polluters responsible for sites on the NPL were required to clean up their messes or face steep penalties, and a government-run "Trust Fund," financed by taxes on the heaviest-polluting industrial sectors, was set up to pay for cleanup at sites where the companies responsible couldn't do so.




Now, as I understand it, the main argument against Superfund is that many companies are already cleaning up their messes—70 percent according to the Bush administration—and shouldn't have to contribute to the Trust Fund that pays for cleaning up "orphan sites." This seems weak to me. It makes perfect sense that industries that have benefited by and large from cheap disposal practices over the years should pay to clean up "orphan sites." Who else should pay for it?

And it's also worth noting that many of these companies are "voluntarily" cleaning up their toxic waste only because of the threat of litigation by the EPA, which charges responsible parties triple if the agency has to clean up the mess itself. And those litigation threats are in turn financed by… the Superfund Trust Fund. If there was no Superfund, you wouldn't see nearly as much "voluntary" cleanup. Anyway, the cost of neglect has been extraordinarily high, and though it's a bit dry, the CAP report does the best job I've seen of laying that out.
-- Brad Plumer 9:01 PM || ||