Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Superfund sites might not be seen as traditional infrastructure, but the land they occupy, once remediated, could support future bridges, roadways, or parks.
As Biden deliberated where to unveil the American Jobs Plan in late March, Pittsburgh was an obvious choice. A former manufacturing mainstay, it was where Biden launched his presidential campaign two years ago, in a sign that he wanted to revitalize the Rust Belt. Now, he returned to reaffirm his commitment to the region by making it the spot to announce over $2 trillion in infrastructure spending.
Yet Pittsburgh was an apt choice for another reason. The surrounding county is home to four of Pennsylvania’s most toxic Superfund sites. (The state is saddled with 91 sites in total.) Although Biden didn’t mention it in his speech that day, the American Jobs Plan, if passed, would pump money into the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program, which has been in a dire financial state for the last two decades.
“It doesn’t look like Superfund is bankrupt if you look at its ledger, but it is,” says Lois Gibbs, the legendary activist who spearheaded public awareness around the Love Canal environmental disaster in Niagara Falls, New York, which ultimately led to the creation of Superfund in 1980. “There’s not a single penny for sites that have no responsible parties, or responsible parties that may still be around, but don’t have enough resources.”
The Superfund program is designed to remove pollution from the most toxic sites in the country through a National Priorities List. If a former contaminated industrial site is nominated to the coveted—or rather dreaded—list, it becomes the EPA’s responsibility, as opposed to the state’s. There are currently 1,327 sites that make the cut, according to the EPA’s website. But over the years, the once-successful initiative has been drained of resources, creating a backlog of toxic sites awaiting cleanup.
Environmental justice plays no small part in the slow crawl of Superfund remediation.
Biden’s infrastructure plan includes an array of climate-forward investments, including funding for a Civilian Climate Corps and the mass removal of lead water pipes. Although Superfund sites might not be seen as traditional infrastructure, the land they occupy, once remediated, could support future bridges, roadways, or parks. As Jeff Merritt, the head of urban transformation at the World Economic Forum, explained to me, “At the end of the day, if the core of that is rotten, whether you are talking about a toxic site or a site that for some reason isn’t advantageous, it’s going to be a lot harder to build value on top of that.”
Biden’s proposal uses a few different approaches. If passed in its entirety, it would allot $5 billion to remediate Superfund sites, as well as brownfields, which tend to be more mildly contaminated. It would also reinstate fees on the biggest polluters—primarily chemical and petroleum companies—in order to rebuild the Superfund Trust Fund, a pot of industry-supplied money that historically supported the program. Essentially, the infrastructure plan would jumpstart clean-ups of toxic sites across the country.
Polluter fees were an integral part of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which established the Superfund. But in 1995, under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s watch, the fees expired, and they haven’t been reinstated since. Since this gutting of the backbone of the Superfund’s finances, the EPA has depended on federal tax dollars, with polluting companies contributing nothing.
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Typically, Superfund identifies partially responsible parties, or the companies that polluted the area, and makes them pay for the cleanup. In a fraction of cases, those companies no longer exist, which is when the EPA picks up all the slack. Right now, there are 34 of these unfunded sites, which are waiting like lame ducks for the EPA to take action. But without funds, it can’t.
Despite relying on multi-billion-dollar companies—like chemical giant DuPont and General Electric—former EPA officials say the Superfund itself needs to have money in reserve to push companies to action. And since 2003, it’s been broke.
It can take decades rather than years to clean up Superfund sites; some sites identified as an imminent threat in the 1980s are still awaiting action. Intensive scientific research, testing, and negotiations required for Superfund cleanups is in part what drags out the process. And in recent years, a lack of finances has compounded the problem.
Former EPA administrators and activists agree that the $5 billion infusion from Biden’s infrastructure plan would go a long way toward reviving the Superfund program.
Extreme weather conditions spurred by climate change have made Superfund remediation much more urgent in the last decade. A 2019 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office called on the EPA to take additional measures at Superfund sites to prevent impacts from extreme weather. According to the report, 60 percent of all Superfund sites are vulnerable to flooding, storm surge, wildfires, and sea level rise—all of which will become more severe as climate change worsens.
In theory, one of the most powerful mechanisms of the Superfund program is something called “treble damages.” If responsible parties refuse to clean up a site, or are dragging their feet, the EPA steps in and cleans it up for them. Once the site’s remediated, the EPA charges the company as much as three times the cost as a penalty.
Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the EPA under Barack Obama, says that the treble damages “were supposed to be the incredible incentive to get polluters to the table.” But now, those damages are an empty threat. “These companies know that Superfund is running on fumes,” she says. Without enough money, the EPA can’t do the cleanup itself, which nixes its leverage in pushing polluters to clean up sites quickly.
Former EPA administrators and activists agree that the $5 billion infusion from Biden’s infrastructure plan would go a long way toward reviving the Superfund program. But they caution that real results depend on the EPA’s willingness to crack down on ultra-powerful polluters, the same companies spearheading the strongest lobbying campaigns in Washington.
The lobbying doesn’t stop on Capitol Hill. It’s common practice for polluters to spearhead massive campaigns within communities, in an effort to shape public opinion and move eyes away from the dioxins or PCBs. Alongside the 17-mile lower stretch of the Passaic River near Newark, New Jersey, for example, these campaigns were particularly fierce, as around 180 polluters were on the hook as responsible parties.
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“We saw groups of consultants and PR guys go up and down the river to every mayor in every city, every city council meeting,” says Ana Baptista, the co-chair of the regional Community Advisory Group for the EPA and an assistant professor of environmental policy at the New School. “If you were at a Boy Scout meeting, they were there. They found every opportunity to ingratiate themselves in the community.”
According to Baptista, these companies threw grants at the community for new baseball fields and green spaces—anything to convince residents that “nature would do its work,” and that the cleanup wasn’t needed. She says the most brazen example of this was when the companies proposed donating money for a tilapia aquafarm, a weak consolation prize for the loss of the Passaic as a source of subsistence fishing.
Environmental justice plays no small part in the slow crawl of Superfund remediation. Americans hardest hit by toxic sites are those living in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Mustafa Santiago Ali, who ran the EPA’s environmental justice office under Obama, sees these as “sacrifice zones,” when in fact they should have the highest priority, since they are the most vulnerable.
Ali says that funding is imminently needed to remediate toxic sites, especially the 34 unfunded areas where the EPA alone will pay for the cleanup. But EPA also needs resources to educate the general public, especially in the face of strong-handed lobbying campaigns.
“You’re going to have to fund frontline organizations to have the capacity to even compete with these multi-level conglomerates,” says Ali. “They have deep pockets, deep benches of attorneys, and marketing firms, all to be able to sway folks.”
Gustavo Andrade, the organizing director for the Center for Health and Environmental Justice, has supported hundreds of community activism efforts nationwide at current and potential Superfund sites. Last May, Andrade helped local activists in Arlington, Texas, set up an SMS service that alerted the community of three proposed fracking wells slated to drill directly behind a preschool that primarily served Black and Hispanic families. After receiving text alerts about the plan, residents demanded a hearing, and convinced city council members to vote against the permit.
In a town north of Birmingham, Alabama, Andrade helped local activists use the same tactic. He says that a polluter company called ABC Coke, which produces foundry coke for metal production, has been spewing ash into the air for decades. There, activists used the SMS system to alert residents of the air pollution, and to rally support for the site to be placed on the EPA’s National Priorities List as a Superfund.
“The problem is that people are breathing that stuff in and getting cancer,” Andrade says. “It’s an air quality issue that’s killed dozens of people.”
These “sacrifice zones” stand to gain the most from a refinanced Superfund program, not only because they will no longer live in toxic waste zones, but because of the potential for economic opportunity. As with most ambitions of the American Jobs Plan, there’s an emphasis on employment and economic growth. In the plan’s laundry-list fact sheet, which gives an itemized rundown of all its goals, it says that remediating Superfund and brownfield sites will turn “idle real property into new hubs of economic growth and job creation.”
Organizers hope that bundling Superfund revitalization with a host of other economic initiatives will earn it bipartisan support. “Superfund is basically a public works project,” says Enck, the former EPA regional administrator. “It’s cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater and waterways, and it creates a lot of jobs. It totally belongs in infrastructure.”
