United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
Office of
Communications and
Public Affairs
Volume 17. Number 3
July/August 1991
21K-1011
r/EPA JOURNAL
// Hell had a national park...
Emergency response in the Gulf
and hazardous waste cleanup
at home
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v-xEPA JOURNAL
United States
Environmental Protection Agency
Office of Communications
and Public Affairs
From the Editor
William K. Reilly
Administrator
Lew Crampton
Associate Administrator for
Communications and Public Affairs
Charles Osolin
Director of Publications
John Heritage
Editor
Karen Flagstad
Associate Editor
Ruth Barker
Assistant Editor
Jack Lewis
Assistant Editor
Nancy Starnes
Assistant Editor
Douglass Lea
Contributing Editor
Marilyn Rogers
Circulation Manager
Design Credits
Ron Farrah
James R. Ingram
Robert Flanagan
Front Cover: Kuwaiti
oil weJJs ablaze, a
historic challenge to
man's ability to fight
pollution
emergencies. See story
on page 23.
Photo by Greg Gibson /or Wide
World.
What is Superfund and why all the
fuss about it? This issue of EPA
Journal gets into some of the questions
about the program and some of the
proposed answers. It also looks at
Superfund's two partners in cleaning
up hazardous waste: the Solid Waste
and Underground Storage Tank leak
control programs, both mandated by the
Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act.
The magazine begins its treatment by
explaining the three programs in
layman's terms. Next, Don Clay, EPA's
Assistant Administrator for the
programs, answers questions frequently
asked by the public.
Then, Thomas Crumbly, President of
the independent Clean Sites
organization, analyzes some of the
difficulties that lie ahead for Superfund
and proposes a new strategy for the
program.
The Persian Gulf oil fires and oil
spills are the focus of the next feature
and the subject of the issue's front
cover photograph. For EPA's staff, this
was the mother of all emergency
responses.
The following three articles give the
reader a feel for how Superfund
cleanups actually proceed, with a "case
study" of the completed Bog Farm Site
in New Jersey, a report on the
experiences of an award-winning,
on-scene coordinator, and an article
describing how a community near a
Kentucky site handled its concerns.
Then the magazine asks four
observers with distinctly different
perspectives to respond to a hotly
debated question in the current
Superfund arena: Who should pay for
Superfund cleanups?
The development of fascinating new
techniques to clean up hazardous waste
sites is the focus of the next article. An
accompanying piece discusses the
outlook for putting these innovative
methods into action.
Moving to the two program partners
to Superfund, one article describes
RCRA Corrective Action, a little
publicized clean-up effort that is
gearing up for remedial initiatives at
thousands of facilities across the
country, and a second article fills in the
background of UST, which targets leaks
from underground fuel storage tanks.
The issue then includes a forum, in
which experts with different points of
view discuss whether our society is
getting a handle on disposing of
hazardous waste.
On different topics, Newsline
features EPA news and a sampling of
reaction; greenways are the subject of a
book review; the Galapagos Islands of
Darwin fame provide grist for
environmental speculation; and "On
the Move" highlights recent
appointments to top Agency
positions, a
John fywt
EPA journal is printed on recycled paper.
EPA is charged by Congress to protect the nation's land, air, and water systems. Under a mandate of national environmental laws, the Agency strives to
formulate and implement actions which lead to a compatible balance between human activities and the ability of natural systems to support and nurture life.
EPA journal is published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Administrator of EPA has determined that the publication of this periodical is
necessary in the transaction of the public business required by law of this agency. Use of funds for printing this periodical has been approved by the Director of
the Office of Management and Budget. Views expressed by authors do not necessarily reflect EPA policy. No permission necessary to reproduce contents
except copyrighted photos and other materials.
Contributions and inquiries should be addressed to the Editor, EPA Journal (A-107), Waterside Mall, 401 M Street, SW., Washington, D.C. 20460
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VOLUME 17
NUMBER 3
21K-1011
JULY/AUGUST 1991
Contents
Editor's note: You,
our reader, will be
pleased to learn
that EPA /ournaJ
has won first prize
in this year's Blue
Pencil competition
for general
audience
magazines. The
competition is
sponsored by the
National
Association of
Government
Communicators.
Superfund, RCRA,
and UST: The
Clean-up Threesome
by Jack Lewis
Questions the Public
is Asking—An
Interview
with Don Clay
Superfund:
Candidly Speaking
by Thomas P. Crumbly
Responding to
Eco-Terrorism
by Hoy Popkin
How a Cleanup
Works
by Doug Cordell
On the Scene
by Nikkii I. Childs
31
A Concerned
Community
by Nancy Powell
Who Should Pay?
Four Commentaries
Innovations in
the Clean-up Battle
by John H. Skinner
From Know-How to
Can-Do
by Walter W. Kovalick./r.
Corrective Action:
Task with a Big
Future
by Sylvia K. Loivrance
Going Underground
with UST
by June Taylor
A Forum: Are We
Conquering
Hazardous Waste?
DEPARTMENTS
Newsline—News and
Comment about
EPA
Cross Currents—
Greening America
with Greenways:
A Book Review
Habitat—Life on the
Rocks...
from Annie Dillarti
On the Move—New
Names in Key Agency
Posts
EPA JOURNAL Subscriptions
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foreign countries is $10. a year. The price of a
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Prices include mail costs. Subscriptions to t'PA
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The requests should be mailed to:
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Name - First, Last
PLEASE PRINT
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Zip Code
Payment enclosed (Make checks payable to Superintendent of Documents)
Charge to my Deposit Account No.
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Under an agreement between
EPA, industry, slates, and the
environmental community,
cleaner gasoJines will be sold
in those cities having excessive
ozone and carbon monoxide
levels. All gasoline sold in (lie
nine cities with the worst
ozone problems will be
reformulated beginning
January 1995. The 41 cities
with carbon monoxide
problems will use oxygenated
gasoline during winter months
beginning November 1992.
Administrator R«il/y said:
"This agreement represents an
essential milestone in
reconciling the automboile
with environmental quality
through cleaner fuels. With the
industry, environmental
community, states and EPA all
endorsing the market-based
and clean fuel principles of
the Bush administration,
refiners are given greater
flexibility to obtain
environmental benefits at the
lowest possible cost.
Reformulating fuels is the
single most environmentally
significant initiative we can
take to reduce air
pollution."
The Wall Street Journal
reported: "... The agreement
commits the oil industry to
invent and begin selling a
cleaner-burning gasoline by
January 1995 in the nation's
nine smoggiest cities, which
now account for 25% of
gasoline sold in the U.S. They
are Baltimore; Chicago;
Hartford, Conn.; Houston; Los
Angeles; Milwaukee; New
York; Philadelphia and San
Diego, Calif. The gasoline must
emit 15% fewer toxic
emissions, such as
cancer-causing benzene ....
By EPA estimates, the gasoline
will cost motorists four to five
cents more a gallon and the oil
industry $3 billion to $5
billion during the next four
years to retrofit refineries and
storage systems. Even more
expensive changes and even
cleaner gasoline will be
required by the year 2000, but
those regulations still must be
written .... It's predicted
that far more cities fighting air
pollution will want to start
selling the gas than the oil
industry believes it can
supply .... The result will be
increasing pressure on oil
refiners and the Environmental
Protection Agency to expand
on [the] agreement reached
Friday. The agreement will for
the first time lead to changes
in fuel—rather than
automobiles, alone—to help
curb unhealthy levels of smog
plaguing almost 100 U.S.
cities .... A separate dispute
also is brewing over a
provision in the same set of
regulations requiring gasoline
with a higher oxygenate
content to be sold in the
winter in 41 cities with
unhealthy carbon-monoxide
levels by 1992. The oil
industry says it may need one-
or two-year extensions of the
deadline for some cities
because it expects a shortage of
oxygenated fuel additives, like
ethanol or a met ha no 1
derivative, that add oxygen
and improve combustion. But
ethanol and methanol
suppliers insist there is a
sufficient supply. The EPA
will have to decide if
extensions are merited."
The Washington Post said:
"... the terms of the
agreement, and the way it was
forged in a process known as
regulatory negotiation, give the
deal an importance beyond
gasoline. The signatories,
representing a range of
traditionally warring
interests—oil companies,
EPA JOURNAL
-------
clean-fuels manufacturers,
environmental and consumer
groups, auto makers and state
governments—are bound not to
litigate or lobby against
regulations that implement
their compromises .... The
agreement thus enhances
chances that a key clean air
initiative will avoid the years
of court wrangling and
regulatory paralysis that have
blocked other ambitious
laws .... Because of gasoline's
importance to the U.S.
economy, its contribution to
air pollution and its complex
distribution network,
yesterday's accord is
considered the most sweeping
ever consummated in
regulatory negotiation, or
'reg-neg.' By demonstrating the
effectiveness of reg-neg in
translating contentious laws
into regulation, the deal is
expected to increase use of this
practice across the
government .... This shows
the power of the process,' said
Phil Harter, a lawyer who
mediated the negotiation.
'When this started six months
ago, there weren't five people
in Washington who thought we
could reach agreement. They
thought it was too big, too
politicized, too controversial.
But through the structured
process of developing facts and
bringing the parties
face-to-face, they were able to
find common ground.'"
Under a recent
agreement, cleaner
burning gasolines
will be sold in cities
with excessive ozone
and carbon
monoxide levels.
Four States
and a Utility Join
EPA's "Green Lights'
Program
The states of California,
Maryland, Florida, and Oregon,
and the Southern California
Edison company have agreed
to join EPA's "Green Lights"
program, the voluntary
pollution-prevention and
electricity-conservation
initiative introduced by EPA
earlier this year.
Under the program, members
commit to upgrade their
lighting systems with
energy-efficient equipment
whenever the new equipment
is profitable and maintains or
improves lighting quality.
California, which becomes
the largest participant, plans to
convert at least 70 million
square feet of facilities to
energy-efficient lighting. The
move will save more than 603
million kilowatt hours of
electricity each year, at an
annual saving to the state of
$51 million.
Maryland has committed to
upgrade lighting in the more
than 55 million square feet of
state-occupied or-owned space,
with cost savings at a rate
comparable to California.
Southern California Edison
is the first electric utility to
join the program, in which
more than 150 corporations
have signed up.
According to EPA
Administrator William Reilly,
with full participation by the
commercial-industrial sector,
Green Lights could cut
electricity demand 10 percent
nationally, resulting in a 235
million-ton reduction in the
nation's emissions of carbon
dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and
nitrogen oxide. The reduction
in carbon dioxide is equivalent
to removing 42 million cars
from the road. Green Lights
would also save nearly $19
billion in electric bills
annually.
For more information,
contact Jerry Lawson or Bob
Kwartin at 202-245-3791.
Steve, neluncy. EPA
Joel Schwartz and his wife, Ronnie B. Levin. She
works in EPA's Office of Research and Development.
EPA Scientist Wins
$275,000 MacArthur
"Genius" Award
Joel Schwartz, EPA
environmental epidemiologist,
has been awarded a MacArthur
Foundation grant of $275,000
for his analysis of the health
and environmental effects of
lead in gasoline.
Dr. Schwartz is one of 31
recipients of the so-called
"genius" awards made each
year by the John and Catherine
MacArthur Foundation of
Chicago. The cash awards,
spread over five years, have no
strings attached and are made
to individuals deemed to be
highly talented and creative
and who are involved in
improving the human
condition.
gasoline by more than 90
percent."
Schwartz has twice received
EPA's Distinguished Scientific
Achievement Award. He was
trained as a physicist at
Brandeis and came to EPA in
1979, where he has worked on
energy and environmental
economics, risk assessment,
biostatistics, lead
epidemiology, and respiratory
epidemiology. In collaboration
with scientists in this country
and Europe, Schwartz is
currently conducting new
analyses of the effect of
exposure to small airborne
particles on human mortality.
Recent findings by Schwartz
and his collaborators strongly
indicate that exposure to even
very low levels of participate
matter—in one city, the level
was 23 percent below the
federal limit—may lead to as
many as 60,000 deaths each
year among people with lung
problems.
JULY/AUGUST 1991
-------
i a™
Industry Release Of
Toxics Drops 1.3 Billion
Pounds in Two Years
EPA has proposed a regulation
to clarify the liability, under
Superfund, of lenders who
hold title to contaminated
property. Administrator Heiily
said: "This rule a/lows lending
institutions to protect their
financial interests on
properties they hold as
collateral, while it assures that
those responsible /or
contamination are held
accountable."
The Wall Street Journal said:
"... Federal officials hope the
protections will reverse
bankers' recent reluctance to
lend money to companies,
small businesses, and
individuals whose property
could be exposed to hazardous
wastes .... There are no
estimates of the extent to
which lending has been
crimped by the threat of
liability under the Superfund
law. But there is anecdotal
evidence that banks, especially
in small communities, have
rejected loans for fear of
triggering clean-up liability
greater than the value of the
credit. Officials cited a Dana,
Indiana, couple who couldn't
get a $20,000 home loan
because their house sits next to
a fertilizer plant: Local bankers
were worried about the
possibility of contamination,
for which the couple might be
found responsible . . . ."
The New York Times reported:
"... The rules, developed by
the Environmental Protection
Agency over the last 10
months, would clarify when
lenders are liable for cleaning
up toxic waste under the 1980
Superfund law .... The law
provided federal money to
clean up polluted sites, but
allowed the government to sue
those responsible for the
contamination. It originally
exempted from liability lenders
whose only interest in a
property stemmed from having
provided loans to the owner.
But recent court decisions have
eroded the exemption .... Last
year, a federal appeals court
found one lender liable
because it could have
influenced the borrower's
hazardous waste decisions but
did not.... [Under the new
regulations] the lenders could
manage, without liability,
properties or companies they
take over by foreclosure,
provided that they begin trying
to sell them within a
year . . . ."
Pesticides
Come and Go
Goodbye to
Granular
Carbofuran
The granular pesticide
carbofuran (trade name
Furadan) will be banned in
certain ecologically sensitive
areas beginning September 1,
1991, and will be phased out
in all but a handful of minor
uses nationwide by 1994 under
a recent agreement between the
maker, FMC Corporation, and
EPA.
More than 80 separate
bird-kill incidents attributed to
granular carbofuran have been
received by EPA. Eight field
studies in 10 states added to
evidence of its acute toxicity to
birds, including the bald nagle
and other birds of prey which
may feed on small birds and
mammals contaminated with
carbofuran.
EPA estimates 1988
carbofuran use at seven to 10
million pounds. By 1994, only
2,500 pounds of the granular
product can be sold annually
for all uses.
Hello to Two New
Genetically
Engineered
Pesticides
EPA has given conditional
registration to two pesticides
derived from biological
organisms that have been
genetically engineered using
recombinant DNA techniques.
The Agency also has granted
an exception from the
requirement for a tolerance for
residues of the two pesticides
on all the raw fond or feed for
which use is allowed. The two
products, M-One Plus and
MVP, are made by Mycogen
Corporation of San Diego and
will be used to control beetle
and caterpillar pests.
The two pesticides contain
different, pest-toxic protein
crystals generated by Bacillus
thuringiensis (b.t.), a naturally
occurring microbe registered
with EPA and widely used as a
pesticide for many years. In
manufacture, the toxins are
grown encapsulated inside a
second bacillus, Pseudomonas
fluorescens, which is killed
and made into the pesticide
mentioned. Encapsulating the
toxins extends the time they
are effective.
When target insects and
larvae eat foliage sprayed with
the pesticides, the creatures'
guts become paralyzed; they
stop eating and die. There is
no evidence of harm to
humans, other mammals, birds,
or other non-target vertebrates.
Industry in this country
released 5.7 billion pounds of
toxic chemicals in 1989, down
18 percent from 1987,
according to initial results of
the most recent Toxics Release
Inventory, which records the
amount of such chemicals
released into the air, land, and
water by 22,650 industrial
facilities. The facilities are
required to report annually on
releases.
Of the 5.7 billion pounds
released in 1989, 189 million
pounds went into waterways,
2.4 billion were emitted into
the air, 445 million disposed
in landfills, and 1.2 billion
injected into wells. An
additional 551 million pounds
were transferred to municipal
wastewater treatment plants,
and 916 million pounds were
transferred to treatment and
disposal facilities.
In the period covered, air
releases declined about 8
percent, water releases 54
percent, and land 39 percent.
While the decline in water and
land releases appears
significant, approximately half
the decrease may be the result
of faulty estimates of 1987 and
1988 releases, Agency officials
say. EPA will provide its own
summary and analysis of data
and trends later this year.
"The Toxics Release
Inventory is fast becoming one
of the most powerful tools we
have to reduce emissions,"
Administrator William Reilly
said at a recent meeting on
pollution prevention in
Washington, DC. "One
corporate executive told me he
had no idea his company was
wasting so much high-value
product until he saw his
Toxics Release Inventory.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Opportunities are there for
many businesses to cut toxic
emissions sharply and at the
same time save a lot of money.
They may also reduce liability
and reduce the need for future
regulatory actions."
The Toxics Release
Inventory (TRI) is required
under the 1986 Emergency
Planning and Community
Right-to-Know Act. TRI data is
available at more than 4,000
libraries nationwide.
Additional information is
available from state TRI units
or by calling the hotline
number 1-800-535-0202.
EPA Proposes
Drinking Water
Standards For Radon
EPA has proposed regulations
setting federally enforceable
maximum levels for radon and
other radioactive pollutants in
drinking water. Radon is found
in some drinking water that
comes from ground-water
sources. Most large
water-supply systems are based
on surface water (river, lakes,
and streams) which is not
likely to pose a problem with
radon.
When the standards become
final, the Agency expects them
to reduce the exposure of 20
million Americans to
radioactive drinking-water
contaminants and prevent 83
cancer deaths per year. Of all
kinds of radiation in drinking
water, radon is by far the most
frequently found.
Under the proposed
standards, 80,000 public water
suppliers would have to
monitor for radioactivity. EPA
estimates that 28,000 may have
to treat their water at a total
annual cost of $310 million.
For more information about
radon in drinking water, call
the Safe Drinking Water
Hotline: 1—800-426-4791.
EPA has proposed ruJes for
selling the rights to emit sul/ur
dioxide under the acid rain
provisions of the Clean Air
Act. It is the first time the
Agency has proposed selling
emission rights. "This
innovative approach to
reducing acid rain
demonstrates the Bush
Administration's commitment
to use the power of the
marketplace to produce a
healthy, productive
environment," said
Administrator Reilly.
The Washington Times
reported: "... The
Environmental Protection
Agency yesterday unveiled
plans to auction off the rights
to emit sulfur dioxide, a major
industrial air pollutant and a
key component of acid
rain .... The proposed
regulation is the vehicle by
which EPA plans to limit
sulfur dioxide emissions in the
year 2000 to 100 million tons
less than pumped into the
atmosphere in 1980 .... With
EPA-run auctions beginning in
1993, electric power utilities
and other industries would be
able to buy or sell the rights to
release the by-product of coal
combustion
The Los Angeles Times said:
"... Coal- and oil-burning
power plants through the
South and Midwest are blamed
for killing thousands of lakes
in the northeastern United
States and across Canada with
sulfur dioxide falling as acid
rain .... EPA hopes that
utilities will be able to focus
acid rain control efforts at
power plants where emission
cuts will be the most efficient.
The Agency expects that some
utilities will make rapid
emissions cuts, then sell their
unused allowances to
others .... Sale of the first
allowances will take the
federal government into an
untried realm of pollution
prevention, using market
incentives in place of fines or
suspended operations . . . ."
/Among other problems, acid rain
may damage trees at high
elevations in the eastern U.S.
Stratospheric
Ozone News
China Ratifies
CFC Treaty
China has become the 70th
nation to ratify the Montreal
Protocol calling for
international phaseout of
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
and other depleters of the
stratospheric ozone layer.
China made its announcement
at the third meeting of parties
to the protocol, held in
Nairobi, Kenya, June 18-21.
With China having about
one-fourth of the world's
population and a rapidly
expanding industrial base, its
action was welcome as a major
step toward reducing the
long-term threat to the ozone
layer.
EPA Official
to Head CFC Fund
for Developing Nations
Industrial nations are
establishing a multilateral fund
of between $160 million and
$240 million over the next
three years to support
recycling, product substitution,
and other efforts by developing
countries to reduce the use of
CFCs and otherozone-depleting
substances.
At the recently held Nairobi
conference of signatory nations
of the Montreal Protocol,
members chose EPA's Eileen
Claussen, director of
Atmospheric and Indoor Air
Programs, to head the
landmark fund beginning in
1993. Developing nations that
are parties to the protocol are
eligible to tap the fund.
Another CFC First
for Mexico
Mexico, the first nation to
ratify the Montreal Protocol
protecting the ozone layer, has
become the first to submit
project proposals under the
protocol for phasing out CFCs.
In a joint announcement with
EPA and the Northern Telecom
Company, the environmental
agency of Mexico (SEDUE) set
out a program under which
Mexico will phase out the use
of CFC solvents prior to 2010,
the date mandated under the
protocol.
JULY/AUGUST 1991
-------
Ongoing Enforcement Actions
Justice and EPA
Act Against 36
Accused of Lead
Violations
In a nationwide crackdown
against businesses releasing
lead into the environment, the
Department of Justice and EPA
took legal action against 36
companies charged with
violating rules to reduce
exposure to that toxic element.
Justice filed 24 judicial
enforcement actions in federal
courts around the country,
while EPA took administrative
enforcement action against 12
facilities in seven states. To
broaden the impact of the
fedora! environmental
enforcement program, Justice
and EPA are applying six
environmental statutes
simultaneously against a single
pollutant—in this instance,
lead.
In 21 cases involving lead
contamination of soil, water,
and air, the joint federal action
was initiated under the
Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (RCRA). The two
agencies also filed six
complaints and lodged two
consent decrees under the
Superfund law. Also brought
into play were the Clean Water
Act, the Safe Drinking Water
Act, the Clean Air Act, and the
Emergency Planning and
Community Kight-to-Know
Act. Together, the statutes
address a significant number of
lead compliance problems.
Judicial actions in the lead
initiative filed by Justice call
for civil penalties up to
$25,000 per day per violation.
Administrative actions by EPA
seek penalties in excess of $10
million.
Consent Decree
Caps First
Superfund Cleanup
in Puget Sound
Champion International and
Simpson Tacoma Kraft
Company have signed a
consent decree lodged in
federal district court in
Tacoma, Washington, June 23
to culminate a landmark
12-party agreement on a
federal Superfund cleanup in
Puget Sound.
Under terms of the decree, a
minimum of $1 million will be
devoted to assessing damage to
natural resources of the
Tacoma waterfront, restoring
habitat, and rehabilitating the
area's aquatic environment.
The waterfront is the
location of a pulp mill
operated in the past by
Champion and currently by
Simpson Tacoma. The two
companies, which signed the
consent decree as potentially
responsible parties, are
contributing the money to a
natural resources trust account.
$575,000 Penalty
Proposed Against
Mobil
A Mobil Oil facility in
Paulsboro, New Jersey, failed
on three occasions to notify, in
a timely way, federal, state,
and local officials of releases of
hazardous substances, EPA
investigators say. The facility
released hydrogen sulfide in
amounts ranging from 450 to
2,900 pounds in 1989 and
1990 and failed to immediately
notify proper authorities as
required by the Superfund law
and the Emergency Planning
and Community Right-to-Know
Act. EPA has proposed
penalties of $575,000 for the
three incidents.
Ground-water
Action Against 10
Major Oil
Companies
More than 1,800 service
stations operated by major oil
companies in 49 states and
territories have been guilty of
discharging contaminated
automotive fluids into, or
directly above, underground
sources of drinking water,
according to proposed
administrative orders issued by
EPA and agreed to by the
companies involved.
Contaminated fluids from
automobile servicing were
discharged by the stations into
sinks and floor drains
connected to shallow
"injection wells" such as septic
tanks, drywells, or cesspools.
This is in violation of
Underground Injection Control
regulations and ground-water
protection rules of the Safe
Drinking Water Act.
All 10 companies pledged
that by March 1991 they had
already ceased the discharges
at the locations cited. In
addition to proposed penalties
totaling $838,761, the
companies agreed to extensive
clean-up measures and other
steps to protect ground water
around the stations. The
companies will provide EPA
with quarterly progress reports.
Companies involved in the
proposed administrative orders
are: Amoco Oil Co., Ashland
Oil Inc., BP Oil Co., Exxon
Corp., Marathon Oil Co., Mobil
Corp., Shell Oil Co., Sun
Refining and Marketing Co.,
Texaco Refining and Marketing
Inc., and Unocal Corp.
Steel Company to
Pay $6 Million for
Illegal Discharges
into the Ohio
Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel
Corporation will pay a civil
penalty of $6 million under
terms of a consent decree
lodged in federal district court
for violations of the Clean
Water Act at three of the
company's mills along the
Ohio River. The mills were
charged with releasing chrome,
lead, ammonia, zinc, oil, and
grease.
According to EPA officials in
the region, this is the largest
federal civil penalty ever
obtained from a single
settlement under the Clean
Water Act. More than 3 million
people get their drinking water
from the Ohio, say regional
officials, and other millions
use the river for boating and
fishing.
United Technologies
Fined $3 Million
for Six Felony
Violations of RCRA
United Technologies
Corporation (UTC) has pleaded
guilty to six felony violations
of illegally disposing of
hazardous waste at the
company's Sikorsky Aircraft
Division in Stratford,
Connecticut.
UTC has agreed to pay a fine
of $3 million for the criminal
violations, according to EPA
and Justice officials.
The charges against UTC
stem from illegal dumping of
cleaning solvents, including
perchloroethylene and
trichloromethane, from 1982 to
1986. The case was jointly
investigated by the U.S.
attorney's office in Connecticut
and by EPA. D
EPA JOURNAL
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by Jack Lewis
Love Canal
legacy—
Where are
we now?
* 1 f!
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$£W--
(Lewis is an Assistant
Editor of EPA Journal.)
,V:>-
I ^
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V.
JULY/AUGUST 1991
-------
As the 1970s came to a close, a
series of headline stories gave
Americans a look at the dangers of
dumping wastes on the land. One
particularly famous case was New
York's Love Canal. Hazardous waste
buried there over a 25-year period
contaminated streams and soil and
endangered the health of nearby
residents. The result: evacuation of
several hundred people. In Kentucky,
the Valley of the Drums attracted
public attention. The site of these
leaking storage barrels quickly became
front page news. The Chemical Control
site in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
contained over 40,000 barrels of
hazardous wastes together with at least
100 pounds of a powerful explosive. A
fire or explosion could have exposed
the New York Metropolitan area
population to a toxic cloud of
chemicals.
Wastes at
Come from
NPL
Many
2.03% Mining
5.04% Dept. of
Energy and Military
8 49% Recyclers
6.46% Industrial Landfill
16.54% Municipal Landfill
Textile Mill Products
Paper and Allied Products
Construction
Electric
Agriculture
Food and Kindred Products
Other Manufacturing
In all these cases, public health and
the environment were threatened; in
many instances, lives were disrupted
and property values depreciated. It
was becoming increasingly clear that
large numbers of serious hazardous
waste problems were falling through
the cracks of existing environmental
laws. The magnitude of this problem
moved Congress to enact the
Comprehensive Environmental
Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act in 1980. CERCLA, commonly
known as Superfund, was the first
federal law dealing with the dangers
posed by the nation's abandoned and
uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.
After Discovery,
the Problem Intensified
The news stories turned out to be just
the beginning. Few realized the size of
the problem until EPA began the
process of site discovery and
evaluation. Not hundreds, but
thousands of potential hazardous
waste sites existed, and they presented
the nation with some of the most
complex pollution problems it had
ever faced.
In the 10 years since the Superfund
program began, hazardous waste has
become a major environmental concern
in every part of the United States. It
wasn't just the land that was
contaminated by past waste-disposal
practices. Chemicals in the soil were
spreading into the ground water (a
source of drinking water for many) and
into streams, lakes, bays, and
wetlands. At some sites, toxic vapors
were rising into the air. Some
pollutants—such as metals and
solvents—had damaged vegetation,
endangered wildlife, and threatened
the health of people who unknowingly
worked or played in contaminated soil,
drank contaminated water, or ate
contaminated vegetables, meat, or fish.
As site discoveries grew, cost
estimates rose. Clearly, the $1.6 billion
originally set aside for the fund was
EPA JOURNAL
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not enough to clean up the nation's
most serious hazardous waste sites.
Realizing the long-term nature of the
problem and the enormous job ahead,
Congress reauthorized the program in
1986 for another five years, adding
$8.6 billion to the fund. In 1990,
Congress authorized continuing the
program for another five years and
added another $5.1 billion.
Priorities Had To Be
Established
From the beginning of the program,
Congress recognized that the federal
government could not, and should not,
be responsible for addressing all
environmental problems stemming
from past disposal practices. Therefore,
EPA was directed to establish a
National Priorities List (NPL) of sites
to target. The program responds (o
hazardous emergencies wherever they
occur, but only those sites listed on
the NPL qualify for Jong-term cleanup
under Superfund. Problems at other
sites are dealt with by state and local
governments, individuals, or
companies. (On EPA's separate
authority under the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act to
compel clean-up actions by owners
and operators of hazardous waste
management facilities, see "Corrective
Action" below.)
Sites on the NPL are a relatively
small subset of a larger inventory of
potential hazardous waste sites, but
they do comprise the most complex
and environmentally compelling cases.
EPA has logged approximately 34,000
sites on its inventory. The Agency
assesses each site within one year of
its being logged. In fact, almost 32,000
sites have been assessed. Of these,
20,500 have been found to require no
further federal action. Approximately
11,000 sites are awaiting further
investigation.
To date, there are nearly 1,200
hazardous waste sites on the NPL; sites
qualify for the NPL based on a variety
of factors, including the quantity and
toxicity of the wastes involved; the
number of people potentially or
actually exposed; the likely pathways
of exposure; and the importance and
vulnerability of the underlying supply
of ground water. The historical rate of
sites aded to the NPL is approximately
100 sites per year. The Agency
estimates that this rate will continue
over the next several years.
For sites on the NPL, EPA is
committed to taking actions that
protect human health and the
environment—in both the short and
long term—from unacceptable risks by
eliminating, reducing, or controlling
exposures to hazardous substances. As
a matter of policy, to reduce the need
for long-term management of the site
or its waste, whenever practical the
hazards posed by the contaminated
material are destroyed; otherwise, the
contaminated materials are to be
recycled or treated to significantly
reduce their toxicity, mobility, or
volume. Another key goal: to return
usable ground waters to their
beneficial uses wherever practicable
or, at a minimum, to stem further
contamination and prevent exposure to
the contaminated water.
At 373 NPL sites, EPA has made
progress toward permanent cleanup of
contamination of the land, surface
water, or ground water—or a
combination of these. This progress is
incremental, reflecting the strategy of
making sites safer by controlling acute
threats immediately and of making
sites cleaner by addressing the worst
first.
All needed construction has been
completed at 63 sites. Right now,
cleanup work is underway at 310 other
NPL sites, and the "pipeline" is full of
sites headed for cleanup: Currently,
remedies have been selected for an
additional 270 sites and are either in
the engineering design state, or will be
shortly. And 503 sites are at the
"investigation" step, where the nature
of the contamination problem is
thoroughly investigated and alternative
remedies are evaluated. As EPA
streamlines its program to address NPL
sites, the Agency hopes to accelerate
the pace of full site cleanup.
A site can be deleted from the NPL
only if, after any cleanup has been
completed, no further action is
appropriate to address an actual or
threatened release of a hazardous
substance.
The net result of Superfund cleanup
work at NPL sites has been to reduce
potential risks from exposure to
hazardous waste to more than 23.5
million of the 41 million people who
live within four miles of these sites.
This work includes the elimination of
threats posed by direct contact with
hazardous waste to more than 950,000
people—580,000 of whom were
threatened by contact with land
contamination and 411,000 of whom
have had alternative drinking water
supplied.
EPA estimates that the Superfund
will spend approximately $27 billion
on the sites currently on the NPL. And
that is only part of the cost. Currently,
the parties responsible for the waste
perform roughly 65 percent of the
work, which will account for billions
more in clean-up dollars. The total
average cost per site runs $26 million,
and there is every reason to believe
that the costs will climb as some of the
more complex sites move into the
clean-up phase.
Hazardous Waste Sites
Are Diverse
It's virtually impossible to describe the
"typical" hazardous waste site: They
are extremely diverse. Many are
municipal or industrial landfills.
Others are manufacturing plants where
operators improperly disposed of
wastes. Some are large federal facilities
dotted with "hot spots" of
contamination from various high-tech
or military activities. The chief
JULY/AUGUST 1991
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EPA has Increased Use of Treatment
Technologies at NPL Sites
contributors of these wastes are in our
manufacturing sector.
While many sites have been
abandoned, a site may still be an
active operation, or it may be fully or
partially closed down. Sites range
dramatically in size, from a
quarter-acre metal plating shop to a
250-square-mile mining area. The
types of wastes they contain vary
widely, too: Some of the chief
constituents of wastes present in solid,
liquid, and sludge forms include heavy
metals—a common byproduct of many
electroplating operations—and solvents
or degreasing agents.
NPL sites are found in all types of
settings: Slightly more are found in
rural/suburban areas than in urban
areas, but very few are truly remote
from either homes or farms.
Yet the idea of a "site"—some kind
of disposal area or dump—still doesn't
portray the entire picture.
Transportation spills and other
industrial process or storage accidents
account for some hazardous waste
releases. The result can be fires,
explosions, toxic vapors, and
contamination of ground water used
for drinking.
Since every NPL site is unique,
cleanups must be tailored to the
specific needs of each site and the
types of wastes that contaminate it.
The range of possibilities is enormous.
First, the site's physical characteristics
(its hydrology, geology, topography,
and climate) determine how
contaminants will affect the
environment. Then, there is the
variation in site type—landfill,
manufacturing plant, military base,
metal mines—the list is long. The type
of waste present adds another complex
dimension. Information on the health
and environmental effects of hazardous
wastes comes mainly from laboratory
studies of pure chemicals. There still
is much to learn about the nature of
the complex mixtures of wastes
generally found at these sites, how
they affect the environment, and how
best to control them.
No matter how exhaustive
preliminary studies may be, sampling
and site observation simply cannot
reveal the full extent of the problem at
many sites. Uncertainties exist right up
until the point where ground is broken
for the clean-up work and throughout
the final clean-up process. That's why
there is no ready answer to the
question: "How long will it take?" On
average—and this includes a broad
range—six to eight years will elapse
between the start of the clean-up study
and remedy completion.
EPA Is Developing
New Site Clean-up Technologies
While technological concepts were not
fully field-tested in the early 1980s,
hazardous waste clean-up efforts have
begun to yield the information needed
to design permanent site clean-up
solutions. Since 1986, the move has
been away from "containment" of
hazardous wastes. Containment entails
segregating the wastes in a particular
place, but unfortunately many
materials cannot reliably be controlled
this way. This is particularly true of
liquids, highly mobile substances (like
100%
75
•25
1987
1989
solvents), and high concentrations of
toxic compounds. For these wastes,
treatment is the preferred approach: It
reduces the toxicity, mobility, and
volume of wastes.
In 1987, some type of waste
treatment was being used in about 50
percent of clean-up remedies EPA
selected. By 1989, that number had
risen to more than 70 percent.
Hazardous Waste Poses
A Variety Of Threats
Hazardous waste can include products
and residues from a variety of
industrial, agricultural, and military
activities. Some of the hazard lies in
the waste itself: its concentration and
quantity; physical or chemical nature.
But much of the danger arises from
Superfund Clean-up Indicators
(Waste Removed from the Environment, 1980 — 1990)
Pathway Volumes Addressed
Land Surface
Soil
Solid Waste
Liquid Waste
4,130,000 cubic yards
5,270,000 cubic yards
1,000,000,000 gallons
Ground Water: 3,880,000,000 gallons
Surface Water:
104.000.000 gallons
10
EPA JOURNAL
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improper handling, storage, and
disposal practices. The result is that
humans or the environment are
exposed to contamination.
Wastes were poorly managed in the
past because the disposers often failed
to understand the potential toxic
effects or realize how strictly they had
to be contained. Dangerous chemicals
have often migrated from uncontrolled
sites. They may percolate from holding
ponds and pits into underlying ground
water. They may be washed over the
ground into lakes, streams, and
wetlands. They may evaporate,
explode, or blow into the air,
spreading hazardous chemicals. They
may soak into soil, making land and
ground water unfit for habitat or
agriculture. Some hazardous chemicals
build up—or bioaccumulate—when
plants, animals, and people consume
contaminated food and water.
Human and Environmental
Health At Risk
Determining the risks of hazardous
waste to human and environmental
health is a complex undertaking. Risk
hinges upon how dangerous the
chemical is, how people may come
into contact with it, how frequently,
and in combination with what other
chemicals. EPA conducts risk
assessments at each site, analyzing the
possible ways people, animals, and
plants could come into contact with
contaminants.
Like the sites themselves, possible
effects on human and environmental
health span a broad spectrum. Adverse
effects on people can range from minor
physical irritation to serious health
disorders. Such effects also can take
the form of slowly degenerating health
or of sudden serious damage.
Vegetables and livestock may become
contaminated and enter the food chain.
A sudden poisoning event, like a
hazardous waste spill or the breaching
of a hazardous waste impoundment,
can pose serious immediate health
risks.
Steps Through the
NPL Pipeline
Detailed study at the site.
Analysts observe site conditions
and take samples for analysis to
obtain precise information on
the types and quantities of
wastes present, the type of soil
and water drainage patterns,
and specific human health and
environmental risks. The
analysts also identify and
evaluate clean-up alternatives
for the wastes.
Remedy selection. EPA analyzes
findings from the study and
chooses the remedy from among
the alternatives suggested.
Remedy options must, at a
minimum, protect human health
and the environment and
comply with all applicable
federal and state laws.
Engineering design. EPA or its
designate—often the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers—prepares
specifications and drawings for
the selected remedy.
Clean-up construction and
follow-up. Although various
parties may construct or
otherwise carry out the remedy
designed, EPA is always in
charge. Cleanup is often
followed by a requirement to
operate, maintain, or monitor
the site for several years.
On average, a site spends 7 to
10 years progressing from
investigation through
construction of the clean-up
remedy. The public has the
right and opportunity to
comment at every step in the
process.
Health and environmental risk is
complicated by the fact that, if nothing
is done, people and ecosystems can
suffer a gradual deterioration for years
and show adverse health effects long
after the fact. In addition, certain
populations are sensitive: elderly
people and children, endangered or
threatened plants and animals. Some
environments are more sensitive in the
way they respond to the effects of
hazardous chemicals: wetlands, coastal
areas, estuaries, and many other water
bodies, for example, or wildlife
refuges, or rare pine or shale barrens.
These are fragile and valuable
ecosystems that must be protected.
Industry Pays For
Hazardous Waste Cleanup
Industry pays for hazardous waste
cleanup through specific taxes. Over
80 percent of the fund known as
"Superfund" is supported directly by
excise taxes on petroleum and
feedstock chemicals, some imported
chemicals, and corporate
environmental taxes. Financial
settlements from site polluters also are
returned to the fund.
Superfund dollars are used to clean
up sites when those who caused the
contamination can't or won't pay.
Companies may be unable to pay for a
variety of reasons. They may be too
small—an individual or a small
company without sufficient assets.
Perhaps they have declared
bankruptcy. In other cases, responsible
owners can't be identified or found.
On the other hand, many companies
can and do pay for cleanup at sites
they helped to contaminate.
EPA spends considerable effort
tracking down the "potentially
responsible parties" (PRPs)—firms and
individuals who created or added to a
hazardous waste problem. Indeed, the
Superfund program makes it a high
priority to find parties who can
perform or pay for cleanup.
EPA uses a variety of enforcement
tools (e.g., administrative orders,
consent decrees, negotiations) to
engage responsible parties in site
cleanup. Every successful negotiation
of a private-party cleanup means that
the money in the Superfund can be
directed instead to those sites that
represent immediate emergencies, or
that have no hope of ever being
JULY/AUGUST 1991
11
-------
Safe transport of hazardous waste is a
concern of the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act. This driver is
checking his manifest before
proceeding.
cleaned up by those responsible.
Success in making polluters pay is
measurable. Participation in cleanups
by PRPs increased from 40 percent in
1987 to more than 60 percent in 1989.
Strictly enforcing laws that enable EPA
to recover clean-up costs has saved the
Superfund about $2 billion in work
value since 1980. Half of that sum has
been recovered since late 1986.
EPA Tackles Imminent Threats
Immediately
The Superfund responds immediately
to situations posing imminent threats
to human health and the environment
at both NPL sites and sites not on the
NPL. The purpose is to make sites safe
by stabilizing, preventing, or tempering
the effects of a hazardous release, or
the threat of one. Imminent threats
might include tire fires or discarded
waste drums leaking hazardous
chemicals.
EPA has invested considerable
resources in identifying sites that
present imminent threats and in
undertaking the emergency responses
required. The Agency has developed
teams of professionals to combat
threatening situations. These
emergency workers may assist in
cleanup of a dangerous spill or advise
state and local officials on the need for
a temporary water supply, air and
water monitoring, removal of
contaminated soils, or relocation of
residents. Either EPA or the U.S. Coast
Guard has taken Superfund-financed
emergency action to attack the most
imminent threats of toxic exposure in
more than 2,000 cases. EPA has used
its enforcement authority to have
responsible parties perform emergency
actions in approximately 450
additional cases.
RCRA: Post-War
Consumer Demand Created
A Problem
Following World War II, our nation's
phenomenal industrial growth was
matched by a surge in consumer
demand for new products. The country
seized upon new "miracle" products,
such as plastics, semiconductors, and
coated paper goods, as soon as
industry introduced them. Our
appetite for material goods also created
a problem: how to manage the
increasing amounts of waste produced
by industry and consumers alike.
In 1965, Congress passed the Solid
Waste Disposal Act, the first federal
law to encourage environmentally
sound methods for disposal of waste.
Congress amended this law in 1970 by
passing the Resource Recovery Act and
again in 1976 by passing the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act
(RCRA).
As our knowledge about the health
and environmental impacts of waste
disposal increased, Congress revised
RCRA, first in 1980 and again in 1984.
The 1984 amendments were created, in
large part, in response to strongly
voiced citizen concerns that existing
methods of hazardous waste disposal,
particularly land disposal, were not
safe.
Generally speaking, Superfund
focuses on mistakes of the past,
whereas RCRA addresses the problems
of the here and now through a system
of controlling hazardous waste from
generation to ultimate disposal.
However, RCRA does authorize EPA to
require "corrective action" cleanups at
RCRA-regulated hazardous waste
management facilities. RCRA also
regulates toxic substances and, through
the UST program, petroleum products
stored in underground tanks.
Hazardous Wastes
Had To Be Defined
Hazardous wastes come in all shapes
and forms. They may be liquids,
solids, or sludges. They may be the
byproducts of manufacturing
processes, or simply commercial
products—such as cleaning fluids or
battery acid—that have been discarded.
In order to regulate hazardous
wastes, EPA first had to determine
which wastes would be considered
hazardous under the law. The Agency
spent many months talking to industry
and the public to develop a definition
for its regulations. As a result of this
work, the regulations identify
hazardous wastes based on their
characteristics and also provide a list
of specific wastes.
A waste is hazardous if it exhibits
one or more of the following
characteristics:
• Ignitabih'ty. Ignitable wastes can
create fires under certain conditions.
Examples include liquids, such as
solvents that readily catch fire, and
friction-sensitive substances.
• Corrosivity. Corrosive wastes
include those that are acidic and those
that are capable of corroding metal
containers, such as tanks, drums, and
barrels.
• Reactivity. Reactive wastes are
unstable under normal conditions.
They can create explosions and/or
toxic fumes, gases, and vapors when
mixed with water.
• Toxicify. Toxic wastes are defined
as containing one or more of 39
specific compounds at levels that
exceed established limits. These
wastes can contaminate ground water
at levels high enough to cause
detrimental human health effects.
Rules for
Generators of Waste
EPA designed its regulations to ensure
proper management of hazardous
waste from the moment the waste is
generated until its ultimate disposal.
The first step in the cycle is the person
who actually produces the waste.
Generators include large industries,
small businesses, universities, and
hospitals.
Under the regulations, generators
must determine if their waste is
hazardous and must oversee its
12
EPA JOURNAL
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nRttm
m mm
mi
IXP: 9-30-91
ultimate fate. They must obtain an
EPA identification number for each
site at which the waste is generated.
According to EPA estimates,
generators treat or dispose of about 98
percent of the nation's hazardous
waste on site. On-site treatment,
storage, and disposal facilities
generally are found at larger businesses
that can afford treatment equipment
and that possess the necessary space
for storage and disposal. Smaller firms,
and those in crowded urban locations,
are more likely to transport their waste
off site where the waste is managed by
a commercial firm or a publicly owned
and operated facility. EPA regulations
apply to both on-site and off-site
facilities.
The generator must package and
label waste that is to be transported off
site. Proper packaging ensures that no
waste leaks during transport. Labeling
enables transporters and public
officials, including those who respond
to emergencies, to rapidly identify the
waste and its hazards.
The Manifest Tracks The Waste
Although only a small percentage of
the nation's hazardous waste is
actually transported off site to
treatment, storage, or disposal
facilities, this still comprises a
substantial volume: approximately 4
million tons per year. EPA requires
generators to prepare a one-page form,
Tri-Slale Motor Transit Co. photo
or manifest, which identifies the type
and quantity of waste, the generator,
the transporter, and the facility to
which the waste is being shipped.
The manifest must accompany the
waste wherever it travels. Each
individual handler of the waste must
sign it. When the waste reaches its
destination, the owner of that facility
returns a copy of the manifest to the
generator to confirm that the waste
arrived. If the waste does not arrive as
scheduled, generators must
immediately notify EPA or the
authorized state environmental agency.
Transporters must carry copies of
the manifests and must put symbols on
the vehicle to identify the waste. These
symbols, like the labels on the
containers, enable fire fighters, police,
and other officials to immediately
identify the potential hazards in case
of an emergency.
Permits Ensure Safe Operation of
Treatment, Storage, and Disposal
Facilities (TSDFs)
The facilities that receive hazardous
waste from the transporter must obtain
an EPA permit to operate. Treatment
facilities use various processes to alter
the character or composition of waste.
Some processes enable waste to be
recovered and reused, while others
reduce the volume of waste to be
disposed of. Storage facilities hold
waste until it is treated or disposed of.
Historically, prior to RCRA restrictions
on land disposal, most disposal
facilities buried hazardous waste or
piled it on the land. (See below, "Land
Disposal Has Posed a Threat.")
Virtually all operating land disposal
facilities and incinerators, as well as
several hundred storage and treatment
facilities, have now been issued RCRA
permits. RCRA permits contain
detailed design and operating
specifications that each hazardous
waste unit must comply with. Until a
RCRA facility receives its permit, it is
required to operate under "interim
status" and comply with a more
general set of management standards.
As their capacity becomes used up,
and as new stringent operating
requirements are imposed, many
hazardous waste disposal facilities
have decided to close. RCRA
regulations require TSDF owners to
prepare carefully for the time when
their facility will close. Owners must:
• Acquire sufficient financial
assurance mechanisms (such as trust
funds, surety bonds, or letters of
credit) to pay for completion of all
operations.
• Where waste will be left on site, be
prepared to pay for 30 years of
ground-water monitoring, waste system
maintenance, and security measures
after the facility closes.
• Obtain liability insurance to cover
third-party damages that may arise
from accidents or waste
mismanagement.
Corrective Action
The 1984 amendments added a
remedial dimension to RCRA in the
form of extensive "corrective action"
authorities that apply to
RCRA-permitted facilities and facilities
operating under interim status. Under
the corrective action program, if
contamination is suspected at a
RCRA-regulated facility, due to past or
ongoing releases of hazardous waste,
the owners/operators of the facility
may be required to perform an
investigation and follow through with
remedial measures. By mandating the
RCRA corrective action program,
Congress supplemented EPA's existing
clean-up authority under Superfund,
which is meant to focus specifically on
the worst abandoned or uncontrolled
JULY/AUGUST 1991
13
-------
hazardous waste sites in the United
States—namely those sites which
qualify for the NPL.
EPA or an authorized state may
initiate corrective action through the
normal RCRA permit process or,
alternatively, through an enforcement
order.
Unlike Superfund, there is no
federal fund to support corrective
action under RCRA. Instead, facility
owners and operators must provide
financial assurance that they can
complete corrective action as
necessary. Specific corrective action
requirements depend on the kind and
degree of contamination identified at a
facility; they may include such diverse
measures as erecting a fence around a
contaminated area, repairing waste
unit liners, installing a pump-and-treat
system to remove a plume of
contamination, or excavation and
treatment or removal of contaminated
"hot spots."
The basic procedural steps of the
corrective action process are roughly
analogous to the steps followed at a
Superfund NPL site (see box on page
11). They are:
• RCRA Facility Assessment:
Systematic identification of actual or
potential releases through examination
of each solid waste management unit
at a facility.
• RCRA Facility Investigation:
Characterization of the nature, extent,
and rate of migration of each release.
• Corrective Measures Study:
Identification of appropriate corrective
measures; study of their likely
effectiveness and feasibility.
• Corrective Measures
ImpJementation: Design, construction,
and implementation of corrective
measures. (Appropriate interim
measures may be taken at any point in
the process.)
All steps except the initial facility
assessment are conducted by the
owner/operator of the RCRA facility,
with oversight by EPA or a state.
RCRA facility assessments are
conducted directly by EPA or the state.
Land Disposal
Has Posed a Threat
In the past, most hazardous waste was
disposed of with only limited
treatment. Improper disposal
endangered public health and the
environment. As a result, in the 1984
RCRA amendments Congress banned
the land disposal of untreated waste
unless EPA finds that there will be "no
migration of hazardous constituents ...
for as long as the wastes remain
hazardous."
The RCRA restrictions on land
disposal have given considerable
impetus to the development of waste
treatment. EPA is sponsoring research
on technologies to destroy, detoxify, or
incinerate hazardous waste; on ways to
recover and reuse it; and on methods
to reduce its volume. The amendments
also encourage generators to reduce the
volume of waste through process
changes, source separation, recycling,
raw material substitution, or product
substitution.
Underground Storage Tanks
Leakage Problems
In the small community of Truro on
Cape Cod, residents discovered their
wells were contaminated with gasoline
that had leaked from a nearby
underground storage tank. The courts
ordered the company responsible to
provide residents with bottled water
and to spend millions of dollars to
restore the water supply. On the other
side of the country, in the South Bay
area of San Francisco, leaks and spills
of toxic solvents from underground
tanks and their pipes have severely
contaminated the ground water.
Thousands of other communities
across the country face similar
problems.
Both accidental releases and the
slow seepage of petroleum products or
hazardous chemicals from buried
storage tanks can contaminate ground
water. EPA estimates that as many as
15 to 20 percent of the approximately
1.8 million underground storage tanks
in the United States covered by the
federal law are either leaking now or
are expected to leak. Facts such as
these led Congress, in the 1984 RCRA
amendments, to require EPA to
regulate underground tanks containing
petroleum products and hazardous
chemicals. In 1986, Congress set up a
$500 million trust fund, to be paid for
over five years, to clean up leaks from
underground petroleum storage tanks.
The fund is supported by a 1/10 of a
cent federal tax on certain petroleum
products, primarily motor fuels. In
1990, Congress reauthorized the trust
fund for an additional five years, this
time with no cap on the amount of
funds collected.
Owners Had To
Register Their Tanks
Prior to 1984, only a few states had
programs to monitor underground
storage tanks (USTs). Therefore, one of
the first steps EPA took was to require
owners to notify and register their
tanks with state or local agencies. To
assist in this effort, the Agency
required anyone who deposited
petroleum or regulated hazardous
substances in an underground storage
tank—for example, the driver of a
gasoline tank truck—to inform the tank
owner of his or her responsibilities to
fill out a notification form.
New Rules for
Tank Owners
The major goal of the UST program is
to protect human health and the
environment from underground storage
tank releases. To achieve that goal,
EPA developed regulations to: ensure
the use of sound, protective tank
technology and management practices;
require that contamination from tanks
be cleaned up; require owners and
operators to acquire the financial
means to clean up contamination from
their tanks, as mandated by the law;
and establish practical and reasonable
standards for the states to meet in
carrying out the program.
Following are some of the specific
requirements established by the UST
program:
• Depending on the age of the tank,
leak detection requirements for tanks
and piping are being phased in over
five years (by December 1993).
• Tank upgrading requirements,
amounting in essence to new tank
standards, for existing USTs must be
met by December 1998.
• Corrective action requirements have
been set whereby all suspected
releases must be investigated, and for
confirmed releases, specific remedial
requirements must be satisfied.
• Tank owners are subject to financial
responsibility requirements to assure
that resources are available to pay for
damage caused if leaks occur. Q
Acknowledgment: The presentation of
Superfund material in this article is drawn
substantiaJiy from a September 1990 EPA
pubJication entitled Superfund: Focusing
on the Nation at Large (EPA/540/8-90/009J.
14
EPA JOURNAL
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An Interview with Don Clay
Few environmental problems loom
larger in public perception than toxic
waste, and few EPA programs come
under more intense scrutiny than
those aimed at cleaning up hazardous
waste sites and toxic spills. EPA
Assistant Administrator Don fi. Clay
has a big job: He heads the Agency's
Office of Solid Waste and Emergency
Response fOSWERJ, which oversees
hazardous waste clean-up programs
under both the Comprehensive
Environmental Response,
Compensation, and Liability Act
(CERCLA, or "Superfund"] and the
Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act (RCRAJ. EPA Journal interviewed
Clay about how work is going on tfie
front lines of EPA's Superfund and
RCRA programs. The questions and
answers follow:
JULY/AUGUST 1991
We realize that Superfund sites
vary a great deal, but can you
describe a typical one — how big it is,
what it contains, how long it's been
there?
l\ I don't think I can describe a
typical Superfund site. Although many
have similar characteristics, a large
number of sites are unique. The
topography is different; the ground
water is different and so on. That is
one of the things that makes this
program so different from any other.
There is a popular misconception
that all Superfund sites are abandoned.
Most are, but many still have ongoing
activities. A lot of the municipal waste
dumps, for example, still have things
going on. So they are not just
abandoned off in the corner.
Most often, though, when people go
out to look at a site, they are
disappointed. One of the first things
we do, through our removal authority,
is take away the surface
contamination: the drums, the barrels,
and that type of thing. In other words,
we remove the acute threat. By the
time people get there, little visible
contamination remains. What is left is
a ground-water problem. You can go
out to some of the worst sites in the
country, and you'll think you're
looking at a parking lot. Go out to
Rocky Flats, one of the most famous
sites, and you might think it's an
ordinary field; there's nothing there
but a few wells.
You have close to 1,200 sites on
the National Priorities List, and you're
spending about $25 million per site.
That's a lot of money. Why does it
cost so much to clean up a site?
J\ A lot of the cost is in cleaning up
ground water. It is fairly easy to take
away the surface contamination, the
barrels and what have you, but once
you have materials going down into
the ground, cleanup can be very
difficult.
Generally speaking, the RCRA and
Superfund programs began cleaning up
ground water in 1980. But unlike some
of the other programs — the air
program, for example — the technology
wasn't available. We didn't know how
to do it. We still have a lot to learn.
We've done a lot of pumping and
treating, which certainly helps to keep
pollution from spreading. But we still
might not be getting all the
contaminants out. It is just very
difficult, once the ground water is
polluted, to clean it up. That really
makes us strong believers in pollution
prevention.
When you've been in the program
for a while, prevention is one thing
you start believing in: It is a whole lot
better to keep pollution from becoming
a problem in the first place than it is
going in afterwards to clean it up.
Is that why only 34 sites have
been pronounced clean and taken off
the NPL?
/i Getting sites off the NPL is not
our only criterion for success. We
think that the 2,000 cases in which
we've gone through and removed the
surface contamination, thereby taking
care of the acute threat, are also very
important. These removals are where
we've had the most risk reduction.
Also, we have a strong commitment
to do worst sites first, and the worst
parts of a site first. Each site has more
than one unit where cleanup is
needed. If a site has five units, for
example, and only four are high risk,
we will focus on cleaning up the first
four but not the fifth. We will clean up
high-risk units at other sites before we
go back and finish the lower-risk unit.
Reducing risk is our priority, not just
getting sites off the NPL.
Continued on next page
15
-------
You mention 34 that have already
been delisted, but 63 or 65 have had
all of the work completed and are in
the process of being delisted.
Typically speaking, how do you
clean up a Superfund site? Do you
treat the waste, or do you move it to a
new site that is operated properly?
/x In the early days, we moved a lot
of waste off site. Most of the remedies
now, over 70 percent, involve
treatment at the site itself. In some
cases, we incinerate the waste, but the
public is becoming increasingly
resistant to incineration. And one of
the things that Superfund does,
perhaps better than any other program,
is involve the immediate community
in what we are doing.
More and more, people want waste
cleaned up on site. They don't want
the trucks going in and out. And
where do you move the waste? Nobody
else wants to take it either. It is
becoming harder and harder to move
waste around.
That's why we've been working hard
to identify and test innovative
technologies. Bill Reilly and I are very
committed to this effort. We've
established a Technology Innovation
Office to work with the Agency's
Office of Research and Development
(ORD) on trying to get new
technologies out there.
We have a whole series of
technologies coming. In the old days,
it was mostly incineration or take it
somewhere else. Now, we are doing air
stripping, soil washing, and a lot of
bio-remediation. We are trying lots of
new things, and many of these new
technologies are coming along.
Staying with the technology for a
moment, the trade journals, among
others, say that the cost of cleaning up
Superfund and RCRA sites over the
next few decades will run into
hundreds of billions of dollars. You
would think that the industry would
be falling all over itself to develop and
apply new technologies. However,
reports say they are sticking with
conventional methods.
z\ No one likes to do a job twice.
When you use innovative technologies
you are taking a chance, because
innovative technologies, almost by
definition, seldom work the first time
around. One of the ideas behind our
Technology Innovation Office is to
persuade the industry to take a chance,
to try different things.
We're making progress. For example,
we're bringing together federal
facilities, which provide the land, with
contractors, who provide the
technology, and we see what works.
But it's difficult. Cost and liability are
always a concern.
In addition to our Technology
Innovation Office, we also have the
SITE program (Superfund Innovative
Technology Evaluation program),
which is run out of ORD in Cincinnati.
They put money into the development
of new technologies and then go out
and try them out at a site. We also
encourage use of the federal
technology transfer program, which
involves cooperative research.
The innovative technology market
has a great deal of potential for growth.
It is important to realize that the EPA
market is not the only market. The
Department of Defense and the
Department of Energy are going to be
spending much more for cleanup at
federal facilities than EPA is spending
on Superfund. The Department of
Energy remediation budget for federal
facilities is already something like $4
billion and going up.
Within a few years, EPA will no
longer be the biggest force in the
clean-up arena. We will always keep
control of the rules and monitor how
well cleanups are done, but the big
bucks are going to come from other
parts of the federal government: as
much as $20 billion from Defense;
maybe $85 to $100 billion from
Energy. The Hanford plant, alone, is
going to cost billions to clean up.
\^ Take us through your program
for locating the parties who dumped
waste at a site. Is it worth it? Do you
recover that much in the way of
clean-up costs?
i\ We put a lot of emphasis on
finding the parties responsible for the
waste. The procedure varies, but we
always start by contacting the people
we think have dumped at the site and
attempt to engage them voluntarily in
the clean-up work.
To identify potentially responsible
parties (PRPs), we use whatever tools
are available: newspaper ads,
interviews, etc. Some EPA regional
offices have gone so far as to use radio
ads to solicit information from those
who might remember dumping
activity. We've searched out the truck
drivers that hauled the waste and had
them retrace their routes for us. We've
even hired private investigators to help
us track down former employees.
As to it's being worth it, last year 60
percent of the new work that was
scheduled will be paid for by
responsible parties. In other words, we
had more money being spent by them
than by us. In the last two years, we've
Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc.
16
EPA JOURNAL
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gotten over $2 billion worth of work
signed up by responsible parties; it
was $1.3 billion last year alone.
Some argue that EPA gets so tied
up in litigation that cleanups are
delayed. Are you shooting yourself in
the foot with the enforcement-first
principle?
/x Actually, the time difference in
startup between a cleanup paid for by
Superfund and one paid for through
enforcement is less than a month.
There is no question that a lot of
lawyers are involved in the program,
and we're work- ing on studies that
will tell how much it's costing in
transaction costs. But the time
involved is not much different at all.
Tell us about your emergency
response teams. How do they get
called into action, and what do they
do?
ix The teams are called into action
either directly, by a regional office, or
indirectly, through the National
Response Center, which is operated by
the Coast Guard. We dispatch an
on-scene coordinator, who goes out
and makes an assessment of what has
to be done.
These on-scene coordinators are the
stars of the Superfund program. They
are the ones who are out on the front
lines. They are a very talented group of
people, very dedicated, and they love
their work.
They are real go-getters. They will go
do anything that has to be done. If you
told them that you wanted this
building moved six feet north by
tomorrow morning, by tomorrow
morning this building would be moved
six feet north.
Superfund has been in business
now for more than 10 years. And, in a
very real sense, Superfund sites are in
people's backyards. How are you
doing with community relations?
A\ Community relations is an
important part of the Superfund
program. Sometimes I feel a little
ambivalent — I've been out on sites and
almost been taken hostage — but it is
important to involve the community,
and overall we think we're doing a
good job. The program sets a lot of
conflicting goals: Go fast, try new
technologies, involve the community.
Hazardous waste can contaminate ground
water. This man from EPA's Robert S. Kcrr
Environmental Research Lab, Ada,
Oklahoma, uses a vacuum pump to take a
sample from a well.
And it's hard to balance them. Our
technical assistance grants (TAG)
program helps. We use the grants to
fund community groups who bring in
independent consultants to see how
we're doing.
In the long term, I believe involving
the community speeds things along.
It's frustrating at times, but to have
people understand what is going on is
important. You have to remember,
people can be very emotional on this
subject. You may not find people
getting very excited about ozone
depletion, but if they live next to a
Superfund site, you'll know it.
Some of the best people in the
Agency are working in community
relations at the controversial sites. It is
an amazing thing to watch when it's
done right. They have an ability to
calm troubled waters by getting
information and sharing it. In many
cases, that's all people want — for
somebody to tell them the truth about
what is going on.
without necessarily using all these
numbers, thereby inviting more debate
about whether there is real progress?
/\ We're taking two approaches.
One is to publish National Priority List
books. We do books by sites, and we
do books by states. The books tell
people what is going on at their site.
They communicate in plain English:
Here is what's happening; here is
where we're at; here is the status.
The second approach is to report
progress in terms of what we call
environmental indicators. We are
trying to get across that the number of
sites deleted is not the sole indicator
of how well we're doing. For example,
we talk about the volume of waste that
we handle, which is massive. We've
taken away 9.4 million cubic yards of
waste. We've treated 16 gallons of
water for each person in the United
States. To put it another way, we've
treated something like 4 billion gallons
of water. We have work going on at the
majority of sites, and so on.
These indicators cannot substitute
for actual risk reduction, but risk is
very difficult to measure and
communicate. A lot of the risk
reduction is done at the very first
stage, when we take the surface
contamination away. We're trying to
communicate the real progress we're
making at thousands of sites while
helping the public understand that we
still have a long way to go.
Progress with Superfund
sometimes seems to be a battle of
numbers. How can EPA communicate
in plain English to the general public
What is your prognosis? Are we
ever going to "sunset" Superfund?
How long is it going to take to clean
up all these sites?
1Y It is going to take a long time.
When we started 10 years ago, no one,
including ourselves, understood how
many sites there were going to hi; and
how long it was going to take to clean
them up.
We're adding about 100 sites ovrrv
year to the National Priorities List, and
we expect to do that out to tho year
2000. We will be taking some off, but
not quite as fast. So we expect tin; list
to continue to grow.
In the first 10 years of the program,
an emphasis was placed on initiating
cleanups, developing management
systems and controls, and establishing
the science needed throughout the
clean-up process. We undertook a
major assessment of where the
program stood in mid-1989. That
JULY/AUGUST 1991
17
-------
resulted in strengthening enforcement
efforts to compel responsible parties to
clean up sites, making sites safer by
controlling acute threats immediately,
making sites cleaner by addressing
worst sites and worst problems first,
and developing new clean-up
technologies. Now, drawing on a
decade of experience, EPA is
examining whether and how
Superfund site assessment and
clean-up activities can be accelerated
by identifying and eliminating any
unnecessary delays at points in the
"pipeline" and by evaluating
opportunities for streamlining the
current process.
Part of what we have to do is
balance the risk of these sites against
the other kinds of risk that society has
to pay for. The Superfund was
reauthorized very contentiously in
1986. Then there was a second
reauthorization, with taxing authority,
last year.
But that doesn't mean the debate is
over. People are already starting to
gear up for a debate in the 103rd
Congress. They are going to go back
and look at how well we've done, how
well we should be doing, and whether
there is a more efficient way of going
about it.
The American people want this
problem addressed. If you look at any
sort of poll, you will find that
abandoned hazardous waste sites rank
very high among the American
people's environmental concerns. So
do active waste sites.
No one thinks the program is going
to go away in the short term. There are
various schemes being proposed for
funding the program; Congress will
enter into that debate. But the program
will be around for awhile.
Q Let's talk about RCRA for a
moment. As we understand it, the
so-called RCRA corrective action
program could involve many more
hazardous waste sites than Superfund.
/x Corrective action is the sleeping
giant of the RCRA program. What it
means is: As a condition of getting a
permit to keep operating a hazardous
waste treatment, storage, or disposal
facility, you have to go back and clean
up the whole facility.
Unlike Superfund, in which we
might have to go out and find the
party, in RCRA corrective action we
have parties applying to us. In order to
get their permit, they have to go out
and look at the back 40 and give us a
plan for cleaning up the whole plant.
There are a lot of potential sites
there, maybe 3,600 to 4,000 in the
universe, which is much bigger than
the 1,200 that we have on the
Superfund NPL. However, many of
them, perhaps two-thirds, are much
simpler to clean up. Somewhere
between a third to a half will be
serious.
It's a big problem. The money will
have to come from the people who
want the permit. What we have to
watch out for is the financial health of
the industry. If companies go out of
business, sites are abandoned. Then
we'll have to clean them up through
the Superfund program. After all, one
of the goals of RCRA is to prevent
creating new Superfund problems.
Could you touch on the
Underground Storage Tank program?
Is the UST trust fund like Superfund?
/\ The UST program is designed to
address the problem of gasoline
leaking from underground storage
tanks at service stations and other
facilities. Again, it is a sleeping giant.
We estimate that in the next eight
years society will spend something
like $50 billion on the problem, which
means we'll be spending more on
underground storage tanks than on
Superfund sites.
One difference is that the trust fund
is not the same. The UST fund is
much smaller, and it is designed to
help states run programs, rather than
to directly fund cleanups. The states
really own the UST program.
Thirty-seven states have created their
own funds. They are augmented a little
by the federal fund, but there is not
the same level of federal involvement.
We keep a minimal UST staff at
headquarters and very lean regional
office staffs.
Whereas UST is almost completely a
state program, RCRA defers a lot to the
states; and the role of states in
Superfund is still being developed. So
there is a contrast all the way across
the three programs.
Would you comment on the
so-called "fairness" issue regarding
Superfund?
A Well, to put it simply, 10 or 20
years ago, people went out and
disposed of waste in the best way they
knew how. They went to a
state-licensed facility and did
everything according to the law as it
was then. Now, we come back years
later and Superfund says you have to
pay to clean it up.
As a result, Superfund offends a lot
of companies' sense of fairness. If they
were doing everything according to the
law at the time, how can we go back
now and say they have to pay? They
already paid once to dispose of the
waste.
Congress thought about it, and still
wrote the law as it is. As we enter the
next reauthorization, I think a lot of
firms are going to raise this issue
again.
My position is that it is EPA's job to
carry out the law the way it was
written. We try to involve as many
people in the process as we can, but
it's difficult.
Overall, I am upbeat about the
program. It got off to a slow start, but I
think it has matured, and I think we
are running it in a consistent manner.
There is no question that the law can
be perceived as unfair by those who
are caught in it. But I think these
issues will be addressed during the
debates in Congress. EPA will certainly
participate in those debates but will
also continue to carry out the program
and continue making progress on
cleanups within the current law.
18
EPA JOURNAL
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1: Candidly Speaking
EPA has a lot of balls in the air,
but can't get them down.
by Thomas P. Crumbly
(Crumbly is President of Clean Sites, Inc., a
non-profit organization working (o solve
America's hazardous waste problem. In
addition to providing direct on-site
assistance, Clean Sites develops policy
recommendations and conducts
educational and outreach activities.)
Is the Superfund program, which has
come under so much criticism
during its 10-year history, finally
succeeding? Given the quick
reauthorization last year by Congress,
one might be tempted to say "yes." But
this enormous program still faces
serious obstacles. To announce
success, as EPA did in December, and
not tackle the problems still facing the
program, could reverse what clearly
has been an upward trend in
achievements over the last three years.
This article presents a strategic
analysis of the improvements needed
in the program under current law. As a
preliminary to the analysis, it is
important to understand why Congress
reauthorized the program at the end of
the last session, and the lessons we
should take from it. The impetus
derived from a number of interests
coming together at the same time:
• Congressional staff had worked long
and hard on amendments to the Clean
Air Act, and many still remembered
the bruising nature of the previous
Superfund reauthorization.
• Members of Congress and the
Administration understood that
hazardous waste cleanup is a "hot
button" with constituents and that not
enough progress had been made to
warrant bringing the problem to the
political forefront again.
• Environmental interests, in general,
believed that the current statute
favored their concerns; industrial
interests were not convinced that
raising their concerns would result in
improvement.
• And finally, the Superfund program
had made enough progress in the last
two years to convince both Congress
and the Administration that the
program should be given a longer
chance to work.
It is clear that the reauthorization
was not intended as a message that all
is well. Almost everyone believes that
substantial obstacles to success remain.
Many believe that the program cannot
succeed as currently structured. There
is, in other words, plenty of fertile
ground both for debate and
improvement before the next
reauthorization.
The Problem: What Is Success?
In December 1990, EPA published a
10-year review of Superfund in which
it argued it has achieved "success on
all fronts.'1 This is an overstatement
based upon a failure to understand,
articulate, and analyze what real
success would be. Ironically, this
failure may be depriving the Agency of
credit for a major victory.
There undoubtedly has been
progress with respect to the volume of
work being performed. The Agency has
steadily increased all of what I call
"inputs" over the past three years-;
study starts, design and construction
starts, remedies selected, dollars spent,
and orders issued. EPA also claims
success as measured by the sheer
volume of waste it has dealt with. It
has moved or burned, in its own
terms, more than 5,000 football fields
worth of contaminated soil.
What is not clear, however, is what
all these inputs mean for protecting
human health and the environment. In
general, EPA presents its progress in
JULY/AUGUST 1991
19
-------
We need an enforcement
strategy that is perceived as
tough but equitable
across-the-board.
cumulative terms. Unfortunately, a
close look reveals that it will not be
able to maintain its current pace. It is
unlikely that the input successes of
1991 will even equal the 1990
numbers. In effect, the Agency has
already milked the system. Over the
past few years, very few new sites
have been added to the National
Priorities List (NPL), and, as a result of
the Agency's (and the statute's} strong
focus on getting work started, the
long-term clean-up pipeline is filling.
Of the roughly 1,200 NPL sites, 272
have long-term cleanups underway,
and remedies have been selected for
264 others. The input numbers,
therefore, will tail off as the pipeline is
addressed.
Another area of success cited by the
Agency is its "enforcement first"
strategy, which favors settling with
potentially responsible parties (PRPs)
over financing actions with Superfund.
This strategy has dramatically
increased the settlements with PRPs
and the dollars obtained from the
private sector. However, it has also
angered the responsible party
community by what they regard as a
return to soaking the "deep pockets."
If EPA continues to measure success
in these terms, the outlook for the
program over the next few years is not
promising.
In the absence of a fairly radical
restructuring of how program funds are
distributed, it is highly unlikely that
more than 100 additional sites will
have construction completed and be
deleted from the NPL by the end of
1992. Since deletions are still the
primary measure of success that most
observers use, the least charitable
assessment (the one Superfund usually
receives) will show that we will have
spent nearly $15 billion and
eliminated only 10 percent of the
country's worst hazardous waste sites.
Unfortunately, unless the program is
altered, this picture doesn't change
dramatically even when we look out to
the end of the decade. Our best guess
is that, under current rules, fewer than
Ry Tom Mayor. Copyright. San Francisco Chroniclu. Hi'prinlod by permission.
o
500 sites will be deleted from the
existing NPL by the year 2000.
Considering that as many as 700 new
sites are expected to be added to the
NPL over the same period, we will still
have 1,500 most dangerous hazardous
waste sites to clean up, or 200 more
than we now have. And that will be a
full 20 years into the Superfund
program.
In other words, the program will
have declining input success, with no
concomitant increase in commonly
understood output success. Further,
the number of cleanups underway and
their cost will continue to rise. This
will be the worst of all worlds. It is
happening because we have not
thought through what success is and
what strategies have to be put in place
to optimize progress at ail the critical
stages—identification,
enforcement/settlement, remedy
selection, construction, and site
deletion.
A Strategic Plan For Superfund
In the early years of the Superfund
program, the emphasis was on
private-party support and on the
technologies to be applied to sites.
While these issues are still important, I
would argue that improving the
remedy selection process and focusing
on reductions in risk to human health
and the environment and on the
perceived competence and consistency
of the government are at least as
important. I would also argue that
transaction costs, the great bugaboo of
Superfund, would decline enormously
if greater attention were paid to the
managerial and scientific elements of
the program.
With the program now entering
maturity, the emphasis should change.
EPA should cash in on its
accomplishments to date and move
ahead with a program that ensures
cleanups are effective in the long term
and adequate funds are available from
the private sector to maintain
momentum. This will require the
combination of an elemental
20
EPA JOURNAL
-------
management approach to defining and
achieving success and an analysis of
the long-term scientific and technical
needs of the program.
There are five imperatives to any
Superfund strategic plan that are
essential to success:
• Clearly define success.
• Implement an equitable enforcement
program.
• Focus remedy selection around
objective-setting and interaction with
stakeholders.
• Invest in long-term research and
development.
• Develop consistent administrative
procedures.
We must do a better job of defining,
measuring, and publicizing success.
The critical success measure, upon
which deletion from the NPL should
be based, is protection of human
health and the environment. In this
context, it is important to note that
EPA has made great strides in
eradicating the worst threats that were
posed by hazardous waste sites when
the program began 11 years ago.
At the outset, I said that EPA may
already have succeeded in large
measure. Its removal program has
probably eliminated most of the
immediate health risks posed by
abandoned hazardous waste sites. We
need to. discover whether this is true,
document it, and use the information
to help EPA focus on risk reduction in
its remedial efforts. To date, little
credit has been given to EPA for the
risk reduction these removal actions
achieve.
The main reason for this lack of
recognition is that the current
construction-management approach to
cleanup focuses on the application of
technology to hazardous waste
problems. It does not characterize,
sufficiently, what is to be achieved
from the standpoint of human health
and the environment. As a result, the
public and the Agency never know
when the health and environmental
"mark" has been achieved.
The Agency needs to think much
more about the end of the game at the
beginning of the process. Over the next
two years, each and every NPL site
needs to have its "objectives"—both
qualitative and quantitative—spelled
out in detail. As part of this process,
explicit plans should be laid for
Mike Kce/e cartoon. Hoprinled by permission.
expending the necessary resources
right through deletion from the NPL.
Right now, EPA has a strategy for
getting a lot of balls in the air, but not
for getting them down.
We need an enforcement strategy
that is perceived as tough but
equitable across the board. An
"enforcement-first" strategy that relies
too heavily on unilateral
administrative orders directed at
traditional deep pockets will result in
a progressively declining program. A
more successful strategy would
demand a mix of negotiated
settlements, unilateral orders, damage
suits against recalcitrant parties, and a
really active potentially-responsible-
party search program.
This strategy would require full use
of the provisions that Congress
included in the 1986 Superfund
amendments but which have not yet
been seriously implemented,
including: de minimi's buyouts, in
which PRPs with limited liability
could pay cash up front to be released
from future involvement in a cleanup;
non-binding allocations of
responsibility (NBARs) issued by EPA
to assist in the organization of PRP
groups; and mixed funding, in which
EPA would share the initial cost of
cleanup with firms that step forward to
perform the work in anticipation of
recovering costs at a future date from
recalcitrant parties. The strategy's
cornerstone, negotiating settlements
with PRPs, must be based on policies
governing standard consent decrees
that are stringent enough to bring in
sufficient clean-up dollars, but not so
one-sided in character that they push
companies away from seeking
settlements.
We must put into place a remedy
selection process that emphasizes
objective-setting, clearly defined
criteria, and dramatically increased
communication and dialogue among
all parties. Remedy selection is the
linchpin of the Superfund program. It
determines the level of protection for
citizens living and working near sites,
the level of restoration of the land, and
the cost to the responsible parties or to
the Superfund trust fund.
Clean Sites conducted a year-long
project that examined the current
approach to selecting remedies. This
project brought together more than 100
experts representing diverse interests.
A major finding was that the current
remedy selection process works
backwards—EPA explores in depth all
the alternative clean-up methods it
plans to consider before determining
the level of protection it is seeking or
the potential future uses of the site.
We found that no consensus exists on
what constitutes "protection of health
and the environment"—the law's
overarching mandate for cleanup and
remedies—and that levels of protection
vary from site to site. We also found
that definitions for other statutory
criteria—permanence, long-term
JULY/AUGUST 1991
21
-------
effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and
treatment—are ambiguous and applied
inconsistently.
We issued a report recommending
an alternate process in which EPA,
with input from all stakeholders,
would set explicit objectives for each
site based on the site's expected future
land and resource use. These
objectives would be based on a target
for an acceptable amount of residual
health risk that is uniform for all sites.
EPA then would explore only those
clean-up methods that meet the site's
objectives. Under the process we
suggest, EPA would define a
permanent remedy as one that will
endure indefinitely and would develop
at least one permanent alternative for
each site. EPA would select the
remedy that will endure the longest for
the least cost.
This process would require that EPA
give uniform definitions to statutory
criteria and apply them explicitly and
consistently in the process, that
citizens and states be given all
technical information as it becomes
available, and that EPA elicit and
respond to citizens', states', and
responsible parties' comments before
selecting a "preferred alternative."
We need to prompt public
investment in long-term research and
development in hazardous waste
science and technology. We must
make the investments in research and
development that are necessary to
improve both our fundamental
understanding of the most commonly
seen chemicals, as well as develop the
knowledge needed for making risk
assessments. While our inadequacies
in exposure assessment are important
to all areas of environmental policy,
the economic impact of our current
lack of knowledge in the area of risk
assessment is most evident in the
hazardous waste arena. We simply
must improve the data that underpin
exposure assumptions if we want EPA
decision makers to rely upon risk
assessment in making decisions.
The investment is warranted. The
amount of potential cleanup facing the
nation is staggering. The cost of
cleaning up the existing 1,200 sites on
the NPL is expected to approach $40
billion. Federal facilities, ranging from
those under the aegis of the
Departments of Interior and Defense to
the Department of Energy, could cost
as much as $200 billion. And while no
one yet has reliable estimates of what
the costs of RCRA corrective action
cleanups might be, many
knowledgeable persons both in
industry and in government believe
that RCRA responsibilities could easily
dwarf expenditures in Superfund!
Beyond these federally controlled sites
are an estimated 28,000 sites under the
authority of state regulation, and the
spending on these sites also continues
// Js not too much to say that
we will be spending between
$10 billion and $20 billion
per year in hazardous waste
cleanup by the year 2000...
to rise. In sum, it is not too much to
say that we will be spending between
$10 billion and $20 billion per year in
hazardous waste cleanup by the year
2000 and that this will represent 10 to
20 percent of all pollution control
expenditures in the Unites States.
This situation is a far cry from what
was envisioned when Congress passed
Superfund in 1980. Then, hazardous
waste cleanup—or at least abandoned
hazardous waste site cleanup—was to
be a quick mop-up of a few sites. With
that emergency response scenario in
mind, it is unsurprising that little
thought was given to building a
scientific and technical infrastructure
to support the program.
Our current situation should lead us
to reassess the importance of science
as a critical element for successful
cleanups. Not only is the problem of a
magnitude to warrant major
investment in making our programs
more effective, but also, for better or
worse, we now know that we have the
time for science to play a significant
role—even if it takes a decade to
produce results.
A serious focus also needs to be
placed on removing the impediments
to improving the application of new
technology. Thus far, EPA's Superfund
Innovative Technology Evaluation
(SITE) program has not succeeded in
energizing either vendors or users in
the private sector to use existing
technology in new ways or to use new
technology at actual sites. Perhaps the
regulatory liability obstacles are key,
but it seems to us that EPA could still
play a role in fostering more
cooperation between engineers and
scientists in the private sector and
their counterparts in government. The
Defense Department, and particularly
the Department of Energy, also are
thrashing about trying to deal with the
development of remediation
technologies. What is needed is a
"guild" of scientists and engineers that
knows no institutional bounds and has
the ability to produce creative
solutions to very difficult problems.
An administrative process is needed
that places a premium on consistency
and competent regional project
managers, supported by adequate
teams of program and contract
personnel, and guided by teams of
headquarters/regional personnel. EPA
made the decision in 1988 to delegate
all site-specific decisions to the 10
regions. While this decision was
appropriate to speeding
decision making, it has left the Agency
without a central nervous system and
regional personnel without sufficient
direct headquarters guidance. The
solution is not to redelegate back to
headquarters but to build a greater
level of consistency and support into
the program. EPA headquarters can
achieve greater consistency by
ensuring adherence to uniform
program guidance and uniform
definitions for clean-up criteria and by
building a number of highly
experienced headquarters/regional
teams to work intensively in specific
program areas with the regions.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, even in the best
situation, with well defined success
measures, an agreed-upon relationship
between risk and remedy, and a highly
competent administrative force, many
people would still not be happy with
Superfund. Over the last four years,
the Superfund program has become
better managed at both the political
and administrative levels. If it is to
sustain public support, however, it
must take some very hard steps or run
the risk of being the White Elephant of
the environment and discrediting the
rest of the nation's environmental
protection efforts. Q
22
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Three to six
million barrels of
oil went up in
smoke each day.
Responding
to Eco-Terrorism
While the fires blaze, a Kuwaiti oil field
worker pauses for midday prayers.
Torched by retreating Iraqi soldiers, many
wells are still burning.
by Roy Popkin
Early this year, Iraq committed
ecological terrorism in Kuwait. It
deliberately spilled millions of barrels
of oil into the Persian Gulf. It torched
and sabotaged more than 500 Kuwaiti
oil wells, storage tanks, and refineries.
The January oil spill was the largest
ever: an estimated six million barrels
(Popkin is a Writer-Editor in EPA's Office of
Communications and Public Affairs.)
of oil, 25 times the 250,000 barrels
from the Exxon Valdez that fouled
Alaska's Prince William Sound.
The oil fires started in mid-February
were the worst the world has ever
suffered: From three to six million
barrels of oil went up in smoke each
day at the peak of the fires.
Thick black oily clouds rose
thousands of feet, occasionally turning
midday into midnight in Kuwait City
and in Saudi Arabian cities just south
of the border. Said EPA Administrator
William K. Reilly, after visiting the
area in May: "If Hell had a national
park, it would be those burning oil
fires." Reilly also noted: "I have never
seen any one place before where there
was so much compressed
environmental degradation."
The potential environmental disaster
was enormous. U.S. and international
teams quickly formed to help Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf nations
JULY/AUGUST 1991
23
-------
! spilla
the f
deal with the threats to public
health—including the health of
coalition armed forces and diplomatic
personnel—and to the region's ecology.
EPA staff members took part in this
multinational campaign to cope with
Iraq's environmental atrocities.
Herewith, some highlights of what
followed.
The Oil Spill
The U.S. interagency assistance team
(USIAT), including EPA staffers,
arrived in Saudi Arabia January 28 in
the thick of the war. It was soon joined
by experts from the United Kingdom,
Spain, Norway, and The Netherlands.
A fundamental precept of
environmental emergency response—to
stop the spill at its source, then clean
up—could not be followed, for the
source of the spill was in Iraqi-held
Kuwait. Thus, the priorities were:
• To keep the oil away from
desalination plants, including the
world's largest at Jubayl, which
produces more than 200 million
gallons of fresh water daily and
provides 80 percent of Riyadh's water
• To remove the oil from the surface
quickly, before it settled to the bottom
near the plant intakes and became part
of the ocean water inflow system
• To recover oil offshore to minimize
environmental impacts
• To protect environmentally sensitive
areas and key shoreline facilities.
The U.S. team, headed by the Coast
Guard, helped develop a plan to divert
oil away from desalting plant intakes.
Containment booms were put in place
and oil recovery skimmers put to
work. In the months since the spill,
about one million barrels of pure oil
have been recovered, along with more
than one million barrels of mixed oil
and water. Some oil has coagulated on
the ocean floor. Some has stained
beaches and wetlands, and some has
evaporated.
Although Saudi Arabia and Aramco,
its national company, had experienced
oil spills before, no one was prepared
for the unprecedented six-million
barrel spill that covered about 600
Mines
Under The Oil Slick
Bob Caron, an on-site
coordinator who works out of
EPA's Region 3 office in
Philadelphia, was the first EPA
staff member to go to the Gulf
after the oil spill. He served as
an observer on Coast Guard,
Navy, and Saudi flights that
tracked and mapped the oil
slick's movements. The flights
were often over active war
zones. On the day of the first
coalition assault on an occupied
border town, Caron flew over
the village less than an hour
before the shooting started.
A veteran of the Exxon
Valdez spill (he was not
working for EPA at the time),
Caron recalls that the flights
were often frustrating. "We
knew how to deal with oil
spills," he says, "but we also
knew we couldn't apply many
of the techniques we used in
Prince William Sound because
there were Iraqi mines
somewhere under that oil slick,
and we didn't want the crews of
the skimmers or those placing
booms to be the ones to find
them."
Caron also helped train Saudi
personnel in various aspects of
oil spill containment. He's now
back on the job on the home
front.
EXXON VfMDl/_
**
-------
i
The wartime oil spills in the Persian Gulf
have posed a massive threat to marine life.
square miles of water and blackened
about 300 miles of shoreline. The oil
poured into a warm, shallow,
They Delivered
When the U.S. team arrived in
the Gulf to assess the air
pollution dangers from the oil
well fires, it found that Kuwait's
air monitoring system had been
destroyed by the war. To
supplement the equipment the
team had carried in, EPA
ordered a dozen PM-10
particulate monitors from the
manufacturer in Oregon—and
had them sent by Federal
Express to the Gulf. Nine were
installed in Kuwait, the rest in
Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The
PM-lOs are the squat, Tin
Woodman-like monitors that
have become a familiar part of
state and local air pollution
monitoring systems in the
United States.
The team trained local
environmental technicians to
collect and analyze the data. Air
monitoring and health data for
the past several years were
available, so baseline
information could be compared
with data since the fires began.
NOAA members of the team
focused on rebuilding the
meteorological networks
destroyed by the war. NOAA
supplied 15 solar-powered
weather stations with built-in
communications to provide
surface observations from
remote areas of Kuwait. NOAA
also worked with other
agencies, including EPA and
NASA, on airborne monitoring
of the smoke from the oil fires.
contained area that takes five years to
exchange waters with the nearby
Indian Ocean. In contrast, Prince
William Sound takes weeks to months
to exchange waters with the Gulf of
Alaska. Oil went as far as 20 miles
inland and fouled wetland salt
marshes and desert shore.
Sadly, the shortage of equipment
and the remoteness of some areas
made it impossible to protect some of
the environmentally sensitive wetlands
and mangrove swamps in the intertidal
zones that provide habitat and nesting
areas for many migratory and native
birds, including the flamingo and the
Socotra cormorant, an endangered
species found only in the Arabian
Gulf. Thousands of birds died. A
wildlife rescue project funded by the
Saudi Royal Commission and staffed
by volunteers did save several hundred
birds.
At last report the Saudis were
considering using bioremediation
techniques similar to those employed
by EPA in Prince William Sound to
help rid beaches and wetlands of their
black viscous covering. The oil spills
stopped when the war ended, but the
cleanup will continue for years.
The Oil Fires
On March 10, an EPA-led interagency
air monitoring team went to the Gulf,
under State Department auspices. The
team included seven EPA staffers and
experts from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
the Centers for Disease Control, and
the Department of Energy. They
carried with them as much field
monitoring equipment as they could.
Jim Makris, director of EPA's
Chemical Emergency Preparedness and
Prevention Office, headed the team. He
recalls: "We needed to find out if there
was a health emergency—were people
going to die because of the polluted
smoke? And we needed to determine if
JULY/AUGUST 1991
25
-------
the urgency of the situation
necessitated evacuating the local
population, the coalition forces, the
dependents of U.S. and other foreign
embassy personnel."
Early and subsequent monitoring
found insignificant quantities of sulfur
dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, the key
ingredients of the killer smogs that hit
Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948,
London in 1953, and the New York
metropolitan area in 1953 and 1961.
It's not known if the expected sulfur
pollutants were and are being
incinerated by the intense fires.
Natural background particulate
levels in the area are relatively high;
particulate levels found by the team
were not high enough to cause
concern.
Although people in the area have
been exposed to an increased health
risk, the extent of that risk is still
undetermined and may not be known
for years. Most at risk from air
pollution are people with asthma or
other chronic lung ailments.
Admissions to Kuwait's clinics and
hospitals showed no increase in
patients with respiratory problems.
The same was true for coalition troops.
An extensive report issued recently by
two teams of scientists that went to the
area under the auspices of the National
Science Foundation confirmed the
interagency team's early findings.
Experts from the Centers for Disease
Control in Atlanta and other
Department of Health and Human
Services agencies have been working
with Kuwaiti and military medical
personnel to spot any immediate
health effects. They also are
assembling baseline health data on
residents and on U.S. troops and
diplomatic personnel and their
families. They will continue to watch
the health of those people.
As this issue of EPA Journal went to
press, fire-fighting teams had gotten
some 249 oil well fires in Kuwait
under control. But hundreds more
continue to burn. Officials estimate
that they will have all but 100 of the
fires extinguished by December but
that it will take at least a year to put
out the remaining fires and to cap the
burning and other damaged wells that
are leaking oil. Priority is being given
to the smokiest fires and those closest
to hospitals and urban areas.
Fires shoot flames like blowtorches
hundreds of feet into the air. Dense
smoke clouds the skies to heights of
thousands of feet. The plume of smoke
extends for hundreds of miles.
Transposed over the United States, the
plume would reach from New England
to Florida (see map). In some areas
around the fires, the desert is covered
with a black crust. Lakes of oil have
formed near many of the damaged
wells, posing a threat of ground-level
fires and pollution of underground
water.
In addition to the dense smoke and
black oily rain from the oil well fires,
emergency teams trying to monitor the
pollution from the fires—and the
fire-fighting teams—also had to cope
with unexploded land mines, bombs,
and shells. The lack of adequate
technology, compounded by shortages
of water, electric power, and locally
available equipment, made it
impossible to extinguish the fires
quickly. For all involved, it was
indeed Hell's national park.
What's Ahead
Fortunately, recent assessments by
EPA and the National Science
Foundation show that initial fears
about devastating effects of Iraq's
ecoterrorism may not have been
warranted. Despite those reassuring
findings, monitoring will continue for
years—of the people, air, water, soil; of
the total environment. Medical
follow-ups and meteorological and air
monitoring, in the Gulf and around the
world, could uncover as yet
undetected pollution problems or
latent human health effects. The
long-term impacts of the spill and the
fires simply are not yet known.
With help from EPA and others, the
Gulf governments are installing
permanent monitoring systems and
early warning networks. Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia intend to monitor water
supplies for contamination from
leaking oil and airborne pollutants.
They intend to study the long-range
environmental effects of the oil spill
and the fires.
For EPA itself, the reaction to the oil
spill and oil well fires demonstrated
that the Agency can respond quickly to
environmental emergencies, even as far
away as the Persian Gulf. Says EPA's
Jim Makris: "The U.S. government
brought good environmental science
and good operational capability
immediately to the scene in the
Gulf." Q
26
EPA JOURNAL
-------
JLU
w a
Cleanup
Works
To drive through the rural
countryside of Howell Township
in central New Jersey is to pass
through the kind of verdant landscape
that harried city dwellers like to
fantasize about. The smell of green
grass. Crisp, fresh air bathed by
generous trees. Horses grazing lazily in
pastoral corrals. Those are the natural
amenities that greet a visitor here.
But up until last year another, less
natural element greeted visitors as
well. It was an odor decidedly out of
context in this sylvan setting,
something residents described as a
chemically sweet smell, like perfume.
Alice Schildknecht, the first to
complain about the smell back in
1974, suggested to local health officials
at the time that it was coming from the
small Bog Creek Farm across the brook
that ran behind her property. She
thought that the owners of the farm
might be using deodorants in the stalls
they rented to horse owners.
"You couldn't go to bed with your
windows open, it was so bad," she
remembers. "People just driving
through the area would stop and ask,
'What is that smell?' But back then it
never occurred to us ...," she says, her
voice trailing off.
In the years that followed, the smells
grew worse, and Alice Schildknecht
and others intensified their
complaints.
Town officials ultimately visited the
site, and even interviewed the man,
Fred Barry, who had bought the farm
at about the time the smells were first
reported. They found that Mr. Barry, a
self-described chicken farmer, had
been dumping chicken carcasses in a
ditch on the north end of his property,
where it sloped up to Squankum
Brook. He said he had been dousing
the carcasses with paint thinner and
other solvents to discourage animals
from scavenging.
Chicken carcasses
had been doused
with paint thinner.
by Doug Cordeli
As investigations of the site grew
more intense, Barry decided to
bulldoze over the trenches. When
concerns about the nature of the
chemicals buried underground would
not go away, he dug up some of the
material and carted it off to a
hazardous waste landfill.
But the smells persisted, as did the
town's curiosity about just what was
buried at Bog Creek.
Then, in March 1977, a fish kill was
reported in the Manasquan River,
downstream from Squankum Brook.
The Manasquan is an active spot for
fishing, swimming, and boating in the
area, and it feeds into the Allaire
Reservoir, near Allaire State Park. The
fish kill caught more people's attention
and generated growing pressure for a
state investigation of Bog Creek.
(Cordeli is a Writer-Editor in EPA's Region
2 office in New York City.)
The New Jersey Department of
Environmental Protection (DEP)
decided to send a team to the site.
While they were not able to make a
conclusive link between the fish kill
and the dumping at the site, DEP
investigators opted to dig test pits and
cutoff trenches to begin assessing the
contamination at the farm.
In the meantime, Fred Barry
defaulted on his mortgage payments
and, with the Federal Housing
Authority moving to foreclose on his
property, he abandoned any further
efforts to comply with investigators or
clean up the contaminants. The state
then posted warning signs at the site
and installed ground-water monitoring
wells.
Two years later, Barry lost title to
the farm through foreclosure. At that
point, the federal government was
brought in at the state's request.
By the end of 1982, EPA had placed
Bog Creek on the National Priorities
List (NPL) of the newly legislated
"Superfund" program to clean up
abandoned hazardous waste sites.
With Bog Creek on the NPL, EPA
began the step-by-step process to
measure the full environmental and
health threats posed by the site and to
decide what, if any, long-term clean-up
actions were needed. Short-term
emergency removal actions were ruled
out since, while the on-site pollution
was serious, it did not threaten
drinking water wells in the area.
The first step in the process was a
series of public outreach sessions
conducted by EPA staffers to
familiarize residents with the
Superfund program.
Following that, a combined remedial
investigation and feasibility study
(RI/FS) was begun to determine the full
extent of contamination on-site and to
assess clean-up alternatives. Extensive
sampling and lab analyses were done
JULY/AUGUST 1991
27
-------
A rotary kiln incinerator, assembled at the
Bog Creek Farm site, burned 20 tons of
soil per hour for three months.
to collect better information on the
types and quantities of wastes at the
site, the type of soil involved, and
water drainage patterns.
The RI/FS, completed in 1984,
indicated that soil near the waste
trench was highly contaminated with
volatile chemical products Barry had
buried there. It seems that Barry had at
one time been involved with an
electroplating concern and a
paint-mixing business and had
dumped wastes from these operations
at his farm. The types of chemicals in
the wastes included volatile organic
compounds, and heavy
metals—all highly hazardous both to
human health and the environment.
The pond and the bog were also found
to be highly contaminated with
chemicals that had migrated from the
trench soil.
The RI/FS also discussed a number
of clean-up alternatives—weighing
their potential effectiveness and their
long-term costs—and made
recommendations accordingly.
In compliance with the law, the
RI/FS was well publicized in the
Howell Township area, and citizens
were given several weeks to comment
on the recommended clean-up plan.
Public meetings were held by EPA and
local health officials to give people the
opportunity to offer comments in
person. EPA was then required to
provide written answers to any
questions or comments and include
these in a "responsiveness summary"
as part of its final Record of Decision
(ROD) on the clean-up plan selected.
The ROD, signed in September 1985,
selected excavation and incineration to
get rid of the contaminated material; it
also recommended further studies of
possible on-site ground water
contamination.
Over the next couple of years, as
work began at the site, EPA staffers
continued to keep Howell Township
residents updated on the progress of
the cleanup through periodic press
releases and public outreach sessions.
In 1988, a supplemental RI/FS
confirmed suspicions that high levels
of organic contaminants had leached
from the disposal trenches into the
ground water and the sediments in a
portion of Squankum Brook.
As with the initial RI/FS in 1984,
residents were given a chance at
public meetings to respond to the
The first phase of work at the
site included excavation of
some 15,500 cubic yards of
contaminated material
recommended actions to clean up the
additional contaminants. Again, the
proposed clean-up plan generated no
public opposition, and a supplemental
ROD was signed in 1989.
That same year, the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers, charged with overseeing
work at the site, awarded Chemical
Waste Management a $14.2 million
contract for incineration of the
contaminated material. Soon, dozens
of flatbed trucks were arriving at Bog
Creek carrying components of the
incinerator to be assembled on site.
During the next several months, EPA
worked with New Jersey officials on
guidelines for conducting what would
be the first Superfund incineration in
the state.
In January 1990, EPA sent a letter to
about 120 people living within a
3/4-mile radius of the site explaining
the awarding of the contract, the
harmless odors they could expect
during the remediation, and emergency
plans for evacuation. It was the word
"evacuation," however, that caught
people's attention and caused a minor
furor.
With residents clamoring for an
explanation, EPA scheduled a public
meeting for March of that year. By all
accounts, that meeting was a tense
one. A small group of local activists,
the Concerned Citizens Organized to
Protect the Environment, or CCOPE,
challenged EPA to verify the safety of
incineration at the site and demanded
to know how the town could manage
an orderly evacuation in the event of
an accident.
In the face of these suspicions, EPA
invited five of CCOPE's members to
come on-site for a meeting with the
Mayor of Howell Township, EPA
officials, and representatives of
Chemical Waste Management. They
were given a full tour of the site and a
thorough explanation of the machinery
involved. A videotape of the tour was
also made and distributed through
CCOPE to interested residents.
The meeting seemed to satisfy
CCOPE's concerns. In addition, at
CCOPE's request EPA agreed to install
a warning siren on-site to augment the
town's evacuation procedures.
With residents fully on board now,
EPA prepared to go ahead with
incineration. But three days before the
incinerator was to be fired up, another
hitch developed. An elderly woman
who lived a quarter-mile from the site,
and who had had her larynx removed
for cancer some years before, was
worried that dust from excavation of
the soil would irritate her exposed
throat.
While federal health officials
contacted about the case maintained
that the excavation would not
aggravate the woman's condition, EPA
decided to err on the side of caution.
At the government's expense, she was
relocated to a rented home outside the
28
EPA JOURNAL
-------
EPA photo
area for the duration of construction at
Bog Creek.
The cleanup then moved into full
gear.
EPA had selected a two-phase
approach to address the two kinds of
contamination found at the site. Some
of the chemicals dumped at the farm
were the kind that adhere to soil
particles and resist moving in the
ground water. These non-mobile
compounds generally remain
concentrated near the disposal area
and are best removed by excavating
the contaminated soil. The first phase
of the cleanup was designed with
these contaminants in mind.
Other chemicals found on the site
tended to migrate in the ground water,
forming a contaminant plume. These
compounds are more effectively
removed by pumping the contaminated
ground water to the surface and
treating it. This describes the second,
more long-term phase of the cleanup.
The first phase of work at the site
included excavation of some 15,500
cubic yards of contaminated material.
Sheet piling was driven around the
perimeter of the trench, bog, and pond
excavations to reduce water flow to
those areas and keep the soil dry for
excavation. The rest of the water was
collected by a series of wells and fed
into an aqueous waste treatment
system that removed metals and
volatile organic compounds.
After a trial burn to test the safety
and efficiency of the process, the
excavated materials were reduced to
ash in the on-site incinerator. Other
work included the temporary
relocation of the north branch of
Squankum Brook so that contaminated
sediments found there could be
excavated and incinerated.
The incinerator was operated for
three months. At a rate of 20 tons per
hour, soil was loaded into a rotary kiln
incinerator and burned at 1,800°
Fahrenheit. From the kiln, the
cleansed soil went into a "quench"
system that cooled and minimized
dust emissions. From there, the soil
was moved to a storage area where it
was sampled and tested before being
backfilled in the excavation area. Gases
from the incineration went through a
"cyclone" that removed most soil
particles and then through a series of
absorbing chambers that removed
harmful chemicals. The gases were
then released to the air through a
72-foot stack.
The only wastes transported off-site
were some large tree stumps and
pieces of metal drums that were
difficult to load into the incinerator.
These were sent to out-of-state
hazardous waste landfills.
At the conclusion of Phase One of
the cleanup, the incinerator was
dismantled and decontaminated for
future use at other sites.
The aqueous waste treatment system
remained on site for Phase Two. This
aspect of the cleanup involves flushing
the remaining contaminants from the
soil by pumping and treating the
ground water and reinjecting the
treated water into the former trench
area. It is a laborious process that is
expected to take up to 10 years.
Meanwhile, however, the most
serious long-term threat—the source of
the contamination at the site—has
been removed. And, 17 years after she
first complained of strange odors
coming from Bog Creek Farm, Alice
Schildknecht is relieved.
"There were a lot of years of
aggravation, and I sometimes
wondered why all these studies and
delays were necessary. But today I'm
very grateful. We haven't had any
odors since the incineration was
completed. My husband's also looking
to retire now and we have our house
on the market, and I know we could
never have sold it without the
cleanup."
As for Fred Barry, he is now a
fugitive. If, and when, he is found,
EPA plans to sue him—and any other
responsible parties—for the $20
million the U.S. government has
already spent to clean up the Bog
Creek site, n
JULY/AUGUST 1991
29
-------
Onth
Chemicals were destroyed with dynamite.
by Nikkii L. Childs
[""he scene is Mid vale, Utah, 1990, a
I couple of weeks before Christmas.
A Region 8 field crew is checking the
old Midvale Slag site for vandalism. A
perimeter fence is being installed to
prevent children from trespassing, and
the buildings are being secured.
Midvale is one of roughly 1,200
hazardous waste sites on EPA's
National Priority List for Superfund
cleanup. Removal action is underway
as part of the Agency's "Make Sites
Safe" initiative.
As the crew goes through the final
stages of securing the site, they
discover an abandoned laboratory in
one of the buildings. Numerous
containers filled with unknown
chemicals can be seen through a
window. The situation, if not handled
properly, could be hazardous to the
community.
The field crew immediately secures
the site and notifies an on-scene
coordinator to be in Utah the next day
with his crew. Before dawn, Steve
Hawthorn is on a plane to Utah—a
four-hour trip from Denver, Colorado.
As the on-scene coordinator, Steve
will manage the cleanup. He will be
responsible for complying with all
state, federal, and local regulations
and for keeping the community
informed of what actions he intends to
take.
Fortunately for him, Steve enjoys
traveling. His region encompasses
North and South Dakota, Utah,
Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado. He
may be called to travel to any number
of sites within the same day.
His job is to respond to spills or
other environmental emergencies that
require immediate attention. He may
work alone or with a crew of 20 or 30.
He may be called to a site in the
middle of a city or to a rural dumping
ground. Every day is an adventure.
A quick assessment at the Midvale
laboratory, made shortly before Steve
(ChiJds, an English major at (he University
of Maryland, is an intern with EPA
Journal.)
arrived, revealed 2,500 containers
filled with flammable compounds,
oxidizers, acids, bases, cyanide
solution, and low-level radioactive
substances. Barrels of cyanide and acid
were sitting side by side. If mixed,
they would produce a gas similar to
that used in gas chambers. Other
chemicals, whose containers dated
back to 1940, had crystallized. Many
containers were unlabeled.
Arriving at a "raw" site, Steve's first
concern is health and safety. "I first
think about what we have to do to
protect the community and the people
who do the site assessment work," he
says. As for his own safety: "The
dangers are minimized if you take the
proper precautions." However, "...
there are always unknown dangers
until the site is characterized."
For one thing, proper precautions
while assessing a site include wearing
a protective uniform. Like all on-scene
coordinators, Steve has a four-level
wardrobe: Level "A" gear is most
protective, level "D" the least. Steve
chooses the level according to the
chemical contamination at the site. At
Midvale, he chose level "C" (the most
commonly worn uniform) which
included an air-purifying respirator
and chemical-resistant clothing. A
hard hat, gloves, and steel-toe boots
are part of every level.
At Midvale, emergency removal and
disposal took several weeks. Some of
the chemicals—sodium peroxide,
yellow phosphorus, concentrated
hydrogen peroxide, picric acid, butyl
ether, glycerin and ether methyl
alcohol—were so unstable as to be
sensitive to shock. Transporting them
on the highway would risk explosion
enroute.
"It was decided that the best way to
destroy the chemicals was by
detonation," Steve said. They were
placed in a shallow pit in the earth
and ignited by dynamite to induce
complete combustion. They were
thereby destroyed much like they
would be in an incinerator. The
explosions were carried out in small
increments to keep the noise level
down and to prevent excessive
vibration, which could shatter
windows in nearby houses.
The remaining chemicals were
packed in sawdust in 55-gallon drums
and shipped to an approved facility,
where they were disposed of according
to local, state, and federal
requirements.
In general, a site assessment can cost
anywhere from a couple of hundred to
a couple of thousand dollars. Once the
site has been assessed as hazardous or
uncontrolled, a removal action may be
initiated. There are three types of
removals—"classic" emergency,
rime-cn'ticaJ, or non-fime critical
An emergency removal is deemed
necessary when there are observable
health effects or potential exposure of
the public to hazardous materials.
Removal expenditures are limited to
$2 million, unless unusual
circumstances exist. Midvale Slag was
an emergency removal.
To initiate the site cleanup, Steve
utilized the on-scene coordinator's
authority to approve expenditures up
to $50,000. The authority is granted in
the National Contingency Plan. In the
end, the total response cost was
approximately $160,000.
Steve is an Oklahoma State
University graduate who received a
bachelors degree in zoology, with a
minor in chemistry. He's been with
EPA for three years and enjoys his job.
"What I like best is being able to
respond to a problem, taking care of
the problem, and cutting through all
the bureaucracy. I also like the support
the Agency provides. " D
30
EPA JOURNAL
-------
A Concerned Lomn
Plutonium had migrated hundreds of feet.
by Nancy Powell
ity
The Maxey Flats Low Level
Radioactive Waste Disposal Site is
a 280-acre radioactive waste landfill
that sits, nestled among gently rolling
Kentucky hills and well-tended dairy
farms, on a plateau some 320 feet
above surrounding valleys. Maxey
Flats is approximately 17 miles west of
Flemingsburg, a small town in Fleming
County, where I have lived all my life.
This is the eastern Bluegrass region of
Kentucky. Flemingsburg, population
2,700, is the county's largest town and
is also the county seat.
In 1962, land for the Maxey Flats
site was secretly purchased;
construction was inconspicuously
completed, and by 1963 the second
commercial low-level radioactive
waste site in the United States—and
the largest in the free world—quietly
began operating.
How was our area chosen as the site
of this operation? The idea of locating
the site in our state took form when
Kentucky policy makers believed that
a radioactive waste landfill would
attract nuclear energy industrial
facilities and ensure that Kentucky
would get in on the ground floor of
this newly emerging industry.
However, the planned-for economic
boom did not materialize. Not one
Maxey Flats became the
state's biggest environmental
nightmare.
nuclear-related industry ever located
in our area. Instead, Maxey Flats
became the state's biggest
environmental nightmare.
The site contains a major inventory
of cancer-causing, long-lived
radionuclides brought there from
research laboratories, electric utilities,
government and health care facilities,
manufacturing companies, and nuclear
power plants throughout the United
States. This hazardous refuse was
buried in 51 trenches that measured
up to 650 feet long, 70 feet wide, and
30 feet deep. Some of the waste matter
was buried in wooden crates,
David Stevens photo. Louisville Courier fournal.
cardboard boxes, paper bags, metal
drums, and concrete containers; some
was buried uncontained.
According to Nuclear Regulatory
Commission recommendations, 10 feet
of material (soil, shale, and rock)
should have been used to cover the
unlined burial trenches. In fact, there
were instances where the cover
material ranged in depth from five
inches to six feet of soil.
In the 14 years that the site operated,
an estimated 4.75 million cubic feet of
radioactive waste were disposed of
there.
As early as 1972, community people
were hearing shocking stories of
improper operational procedures and
incidents of serious safety violations
from frightened employees at the site.
One ex-worker told how he had
occasionally seen "hot" liquid material
being dumped over the hillside and
how liquid waste containing
plutonium-239 was accidentally
spilled and eventually drained out of
the restricted area. It was also rumored
that some employees had salvaged
contaminated watches, tools, and other
small items sent to the site for burial
and had either sold them or given
them away.
By 1974, stories like these prompted
worried Fleming County residents to
form the Maxey Flats Radiation
Protection Association. The purpose of
this group of concerned citizens was to
persuade state officials to close the
site. They met with the governor and
key legislative leaders; they testified
before the newly formed "Special
Advisory Committee on Nuclear
Citizen concern led to the closure of and
clean-up plans for the Maxey Flats low
level radioactive waste site in Kentucky.
Starting in 1963, nuclear waste had been
buried in 57 trenches like this one.
JULY/AUGUST 1991
31
-------
Issues"; and they took their story to
the media. Gaining widespread public
support for their cause through
national TV and press coverage, they
obtained a promise from Kentucky's
governor that he would close the site
"at the first evidence that it could not
be contained."
This evidence came in August 1977,
when state monitoring reports
confirmed unequivocally that
radioactive leachate was migrating
from the burial trenches out of the
restricted area. In December 1977, state
officials ordered the site closed, after
three intense, frustrating years of
dedicated work by the Maxey Flats
Radiation Protection Association.
In the years between 1977, when
Maxey Flats was officially closed, and
1986, when EPA placed it on the
National Priorities List (NPL), millions
of dollars in state funds were spent on
maintaining and stabilizing the site.
Also during that time, the first Maxey
Flats citizens group, feeling secure in
the knowledge that the site was
permanently closed, decided to
disband.
Being an NPL site made Maxey Flats
eligible for clean-up operations under
the federally funded Superfund
program. An important part of this
program is citizen involvement at the
local level in decision making that
relates to the clean-up actions. To help
the public participate in an informed
manner, EPA has Technical Assistance
Grants (TAG) available—one grant per
site—for a qualifying community group
in the area impacted by a Superfund
site.
The TAG program provides up to
$50,000 for a qualifying group, which
is to be used to hire a technical
advisor to review and interpret
site-related information for them.
In 1986, when the TAG program was
established, the Kentucky
Environmental Quality Commission (a
citizens advisory board) worked with
our state representative to form a
citizens group that would be eligible to
apply for one of the $50,000 grants.
1 was not active in the Maxey Flats
citizens group of the early 1970s, but
because of my interest in the site and
my activities on other state
environmental problems, I was asked
by my state representative to serve on
the executive committee and was
elected treasurer of the new group.
Four former members of the first
Maxey Flats group also serve on the
executive committee, along with two
biologists from a local community
college and a state university.
Applying for the grant was a lengthy
and involved process. We started
laying the groundwork in January 1988
and gave our group the name Maxey
Flats Concerned Citizens (MFCC). We
drafted bylaws and filed the proper
papers to become incorporated. By
The secrecy that shrouded
Maxey Flats for so many
years has been cleared.
September 1988, we were off and
running, ready to submit our grant
application to EPA.
One of the basic TAG requirements
is for the eligible group to provide a
35-percent match of the grant funds.
Since we knew it would be next to
impossible for us to come up with that
much money, we requested, and were
granted, a waiver of the 35-percent
match. We did, however, have to
reapply and agree to a 15-percent
in-kind match. On January 13, 1989,
our application was approved, and
MFCC became the first citizens group
in EPA Region 4—and the second in
the United States—to receive a TAG.
We hired Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, a
prominent nuclear physicist from New
York, to act as our Technical Advisor.
Dr. Resnikoff analyzes the documents
generated during the Remedial
Investigation and Feasibility Study
(RI/FS). He reviews and summarizes
the risk assessments and remediation
work plans. In addition, he closely
checks and evaluates the monthly
monitoring reports conducted by the
state, investigates and examines the
various problems that continually arise
at the site, and then relays all this
information to us each month in a
formal report.
Conferring regularly with EPA and
state officials concerning on-site
related activities, he assists us in
preparing public fact sheets and
represents our group at public
hearings.
At a public meeting on June 13th of
this year, EPA's proposed clean-up
plans were revealed to the public.
Eighteen potential remedial
alternatives were developed and
evaluated. Of these, EPA's choice was
natural stabilization.
We have been very pleased with the
cooperation and consideration we
received from the staff at EPA's Region
4. We were surprised that they not
only listened to our suggestions, but
included some of them in their closure
plans. Some of these suggestions are:
• The procurement of a buffer zone
adjacent to the site property
• A reopener clause for future
remedial construction
• Concrete horizontal barriers to be
installed later if needed
• Remedial review performed every
five years
• Leachate to be removed from present
trenches, solidified, and disposed of in
new trenches.
Some of the things that we think
should be clarified in EPA's plan
include institutional controls for future
site security and adequate funding for
a perpetual maintenance and
monitoring plan.
We have the opportunity to address
these and other issues during a 60-day
public comment period. At the end of
this period, EPA will answer questions
and reply to the issues raised by the
public in a Responsiveness Summary
that will become an official part of the
Agency's documented decision on the
remedy. The final Record of Decision
is expected to be issued in late 1991.
The secrecy that shrouded Maxey
Flats for so many years has been
cleared. We now have access to
information and records concerning
the site activities and remediation
plans. However, the people of Fleming
County know that, regardless of which
plan is implemented, the public health
and environmental threats that Maxey
Flats poses will remain with us
forever. D
{Powell is treasurer and board member of
Maxey Flats Concerned Citizens, Inc. She
is also a member of Kentuckians for the
Commonwealth, a statewide grassroots
environmental organization; co-/ounder of
Fleming County Concerned Citizens, a
group opposing the import of out-of-state
garbage by a local landfill, and a
grandmother.)
32
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Elizabeth, New jersey, was the scene of this spectacular explosion and
fire in April 198(1 when storage drums at Chemical Control Corporation
blew up. The incident helped persuade Congress to enact the
Superfund law.
Widfl Worid phntu.
-
On November 5, 1990, Congress
reauthorized Super/und (o operate
through 1994. That, it would seem,
should settle the matter for the time
being: 7'he party responsible /or the
waste pays to clean it up. However, the
debate over liability continues.
Some argue that local governments
that haul household gorbage to
Superfund sites should share in the cost
of cleaning them up. Others, in the
banking community, have objected to
being held liable through their holding
title, as lenders, to contaminated
property. Some members of the
insurance industry are suggesting that
the current litigation-based system slows
progress by diverting funds from
clean-up work to liability
determinations. They propose supporting
Superfund through a surtax on
commercial and industrial insurance
premiums and repealing liability for
"old" sites. Many in the environmental
community believe the current law is
sound but that it should be enforced
more aggressively.
The debate likely will continue. As
noted elsewhere in this issue, currently
there are nearly 1,200 sites on the
National Priorities List, and EPA expects
to add 100 sites a year through the year
2000. The average site is taking six to
eight years from the time it is first
investigated until the time cleanup is
completed, and at a cost of $26 million.
EPA Journal invited representatives
of four parties to the debate over
liability to contribute to the following
forum focusing on the question, Who
should pay? Their answers follow:
JULY/AUGUST 1991
-------
Jan M. Edelstein
Ten years ago, the question of who
should pay for cleaning up old
hazardous waste sites was one of the
core Superfund issues. Today, it is the
wrong question.
After observing the decade-long
gridlock induced by Superfund's existing
liability-based funding system, we
should no longer waste time asking who
should pay to clean up old sites. Instead
we should ask, "What will work?"
Support for the current system, to the
extent it exists, is based on a number of
myths about who pays and what results
the system achieves. Once these myths
are exploded, perhaps we can focus the
debate on finding the best alternative.
• Myth 1: Polluters pay.
Not true. Under Superfund, to be held
liable for clean-up costs, there is no
requirement that the waste you
contributed to a site must cause the
environmental damage being remedied.
Thus, even if you sent trace amounts of
cadmium to a site and the Superfund
remedy is addressing PCB-contaminated
ground water, you could still be required
to finance all or part of the cleanup. In
other words, you would be cleaning up
someone else's pollution.
Not only that, but you need not have
done something wrong to be snared in
the Superfund dragnet. Thus, even if you
were ordered to send your waste to a
state-permitted facility, you can still be
liable under Superfund.
• Myth 2: The current system results in
payments by potentially responsible
parties (PRPs) proportional to their waste
contributions.
Wrong again. The joint and several
liability aspect of the liability system
means that responsible parties at a
Superfund site can be sued together or
separately for 100 percent of the
clean-up costs, or any one party who is
held liable may be held responsible for
the entire cleanup, regardless of the
extent of the party's involvement at the
site. This virtually guarantees that PRPs
will pay in amounts unrelated to actual
waste contribution.
In addition to being unfair, this joint
and several liability system is one of the
engines that drives the litigation train.
Any company that is held liable will
understandably seek contributions to the
cleanup from as many other potentially
responsible parties as possible. The
result is third, fourth, and even fifth
party contribution lawsuits.
• Myth 3: Superfund is working.
After 10 years and $10 billion spent or
obligated, 63—or about 5 percent—of the
nearly 1,200 sites on the Superfund
NPL have been cleaned up. That's
working? EPA says with pride that
cleanups are ongoing at hundreds of
sites. But since many sites are divided
into "operable units," cleanup is actually
going on only at portions of these sites.
Cleanup of an entire site may still be
years away. Moreover, even where
cleanups are taking place, litigation over
allocation of liability will likely go on for
years.
• Myth 4: Citizens support Superfund.
Anyone who makes this claim has not
talked to people who live near these
sites. One example out of many: In
Ashtabula, Ohio, local officials,
businesses, and citizens are so disgusted
with Superfund's failure to conduct even
a single clean-up action in 10 years at
the Fields Brook site that they have
organized a group dedicated to, among
other things, keeping the polluted
Ashtabula River off the NPL. "If it ever
gets on," said one citizen, "we'll never
get it cleaned up." That is the legacy
Superfund is leaving in its wake.
• Myth 5: Transaction costs will
decrease in the future.
Everyone knows the stories about
Superfund's staggering transaction costs.
Many Superfund supporters dismiss this
as a receding problem. It is probably true
that EPA's transaction costs will decrease
as it implements its new policy to force
PRPs to perform more work through
Unilateral Administrative Orders
(UAOs). And undoubtedly, some PRP
transaction costs will decline simply
because frequently named PRPs become
more experienced at resolving cost
allocation disputes.
But transaction costs associated with
contribution lawsuits will not go down
at all. As John Dingell (D-Michigan),
Chairman of the House Committee on
Energy and Commerce, and other
committeemen wrote to EPA recently:
"... EPA's approach does not equate
with the agency remaining neutral on
allocation issues. On the contrary, EPA
may have actually made things worse,
because the agency has failed to
recognize the impact of its approach on
the allocation dynamics among PRPs. We
are concerned that EPA's approach may
be creating a series of disincentives to
settlement at Superfund sites and may
also be generating unnecessary litigation
among PRPs." In other words, EPA's new
policy simply redistributes transaction
costs rather than reducing them in the
aggregate.
• Myth 6: Superfund's liability system
forces companies to handle waste
responsibly.
There are absolutely no data to support
this often stated benefit, but assume it to be
true for the sake of argument. Under the
alternative funding system the American
International Group (AIG) has proposed,
Superfund liability would remain for
current and new sites. But it is illogical
to suggest that the Superfund liability
system influences behavior at sites
which no longer operate. There is simply
no behavior to influence. However,
retaining Superfund liability for current
and future waste disposal—coupled with
other laws which impose tough penalties
on those who mishandle hazardous
wastes—would preserve incentives for
sound waste management.
• Myth 7: EPA has turned the program
around.
Things are probably working better.
But when it comes to Superfund, it is
wise to heed the counsel of the sage who
declared that there are lies, damned lies,
and statistics. Take one example: A chart
based on EPA data and published in the
Washington Post (June 19, 1991)
indicates that Superfund cleanups have
been completed or are ongoing at 1,139
sites! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to
figure out quickly that something is
askew. If the figures tell the whole story,
then one would conclude that the vast
majority of Superfund sites are at or near
complete cleanup. And we know that to
be far from the truth.
It is clear to AIG that the current
approach to raising funds is not resulting
in prompt, long-term cleanups. It is
equally clear that no amount of tinkering
with the system will produce the results
the American people expected.
In our view, the current system has
one enormous weakness: Site-specific
fund-raising requires government and
private parties to divert enormous
resources, time, and money to
identifying and negotiating (or litigating)
with PRPs to raise clean-up funds.
Inevitably, this legal warfare diverts
attention from the primary goal of
finding and implementing the best
long-term clean-up remedy.
.',4
EPA JOURNAL
-------
M.L (Mort) Mullins
We believe the best way to clean up
old sites is to abandon the
point-the-finger features of the current
system and move to a "no-fault" system
which emphasizes cleanup rather than
fund-raising. Although no system is
perfect, a no-fault approach represents a
practical solution to a festering problem.
The simple truth is that business,
insurers, environmentalists, and other
stakeholders can all continue to stand on
the same rickety soapboxes chanting
their same old slogans—or we can try to
find a better way.
To that end, AIG has proposed
creation of a National Environmental
Trust Fund (NETF) which would be
much larger than the existing Superfund.
It would be paid for by all economic
sectors (including insurers) without
regard to site-specific liability—and
dedicated for EPA to use to clean up old
Superfund sites. One possible funding
approach would be adding a separate,
earmarked fee to all commercial
insurance premiums paid in the United
States. A method of payment would also
be established for self-insurers. Even a
modest assessment of 2 percent of
premiums and an equivalent amount for
self-insureds would yield about $40
billion over the next decade, enough to
clean up all the waste sites now on the
NPL.
The fact is the current system is not
working. And even if EPA's newly
aggressive enforcement tactics reduce
delays, the job will still take years to
finish, and spending on transaction costs
will be unacceptably high. We have
discovered that the price of having a
system which stresses retribution is
enormously high, both in dollars and
environmental stagnation. At some point,
society's interest in completing the job of
cleaning up old hazardous waste sites
should guide our thinking. That time has
come.
fEdelstein is Special Assistant to the
Chairman of American International
Group, Inc., a prominent U.S.-based
international insurance organization and
the nation's largest underwriter of
commercial and industrial insurance
coverages.)
ln+h« .
disposal oF
-tx>x i
-thismefhod
is still
cheapest-.
and simplest
to
rid of the
problem.
Clay Bennett cartoon. Reprinted with permission.
It was a dark and stormy night. John
and June Q. Public were climbing the
stairs to watch the 11 o'clock news and
retire when there came a knock on their
door. John answered and was surprised
to find standing there a representative of
the regional EPA office. The visitor bore
a notification saying that John and June
had been named "potentially responsible
parties" (PRPs) and were being ordered
to clean up the town dump. This
directive was based on their having sent
various substances to the dump over the
years that were on the list of Superfund
"hazardous substances."
John and June were singled out in this
instance because there was a clear record
of their trash having been sent to the site
and because of their ability to pay. They
were assured, however, that they could,
in turn, sue their neighbors who were
not being served with an order. When
they asked why this was happening, they
were told that Congress wanted polluters
to pay and be taught a lesson about
proper waste management.
Sound far-fetched? This is merely an
individualized version of what happens
every day to businesses large and small
across America that run afoul of the
Superfund liability standard.
The severity of the Superfund liability
standard may be gleaned from the
following:
• It is imposed without any showing of
fault or knowledge.
• It is retroactive for actions and
practices that were legal, normal, and
considered proper at the time.
• It is not related to whether the wastes
treated or disposed of caused the
conditions requiring cleanup.
• And finally, the standard is joint and
several, which means that any one PRP
can be required to pay the total cost of
cleanup at a site regardless of his or her
share of responsibility.
EPA, states, and some courts are
stretching the standard even further to
demand cleanup or payment in cases
JULY/AUGUST 1991
-------
where a firm's wastes were merely
transshipped through a site; where
drums bearing a firm's logo were found
at a site (even though the wastes were
not associated with the firm); and where
firms had sent not wastes but raw
materials to a site for processing.
On a national basis, almost $4 billion
in clean-up costs or contributions have
been paid or committed by PRPs. In
addition, approximately $10 billion have
been generated by special taxes on
industry (the so-called "feedstock" and
"corporate environmental taxes") and
expended—through the
"Superfund"—for Agency overhead,
contractor administrative costs, and
cleanup of sites where no responsible
parties exist (the "orphan sites"). Thus,
responsible parties—who, in many cases
paid for disposal of wastes initially—pay
again in the form of taxes and once more
when assessed liability at a site.
Expenditures from the fund will
almost double over the next five years.
All of this has resulted in completion of
only 5 percent of the sites (nearly 1,200)
listed on the NPL, and entries on that
list are expected by many to at least
double in number.
In addition, the litigious nature of the
program creates so-called transaction
costs—largely legal expenses—which, for
some sites, has equaled the actual
clean-up cost. These excessive costs
stem, in part, from the threat of the
joint-and-several standard and the fact
that any one PRP couJd be held liable for
the entire cost of cleanup at a site, often
an amount that could bankrupt many
corporations. Thus, PRPs defend
themselves vigorously in the face of this
draconian potential, however theoretical.
Further, the Agency approaches the
PRP community on an "enforcement
first" basis, bristling with lawyers,
orders, threats of treble damages, acting
against selected "deep pocket" PRPs to
avoid the burden of dealing with all
parties, and limiting the opportunity for
review to the official record: All of this
results in a lawyer-laden process. A
typical site confrontation consists not
only of EPA and responsible parties (and
their insurers) and all of their lawyers,
but also the Departments of Justice and
State and sometimes local officials and
natural resource trustees (and all of their
lawyers).
Beyond the inequity of the liability
standard and the excessive transaction
costs it creates, there is a serious
question as to whether many, if not
most, of these sites really pose any
appreciable risk to human health or the
environment. EPA's removal program is
the first phase of the Superfund process,
whereby immediate threats are mitigated
and source materials (such as chemicals
in drums or tanks) are removed.
Removals clearly have been a
success—so much so that the additional
risk reduction attributable to cleanup
beyond the initial removal is often
difficult, if not impossible, to calculate
or justify.
The cost of these "initial removals was
originally limited by the statute to less
than $1 million (subsequently increased
to $2 million). Complete cleanups,
however, currently average $30 million
and continue to escalate! Clearly, some
sites justify remediation. But many
clearly do not, either because of the low
risk posed or the lack of a technical
approach that will work. Many sites
should, as applicable, be fenced, capped,
and monitored—at least until we learn
more about the risk or how an effective
cleanup can be carried out.
When Superfund was enacted in 1980
and reauthorized in 1986 and 1990, the
authors were relatively silent as to
intended objectives. However, the
legislative history suggests that
protecting human health and the
environment (i.e., timely and effective
cleanup), modifying waste management
behavior, and punishing or making the
"polluter pay" were paramount in their
minds (though not necessarily in that
order). Further, the statute explicitly says
that permanence and cost effectiveness
of remedies are to be considered.
The outcome certainly achieves
payment by responsible parties—to the
point of being inequitable, damaging to
the vitality of many businesses, and
wasteful. Superfund liability—along with
soaring waste management costs and
community right-to-know reporting—has
heightened awareness as to the
incentives for responsible waste
management and pollution prevention.
This cultural change.-is in place, and it is
questionable whether further
"punishment" is equitable, necessary, or
desirable.
Further, Superfund has demonstrated
clearly that compliance with what is
deemed responsible today will not
necessarily avoid Superfund liability
tomorrow. The program is certainly
punitive, but the officers, owners, and
shareholders of companies today are
seldom those who were involved when
yesterday's treatment or disposal sites
were created. Those who were involved
generally operated in the belief that
practices then used were appropriate and
responsible. In fact, a significant portion
of the substances triggering liability
resulted from air-pollution control
sludges. The program, except for initial
removals, is far from cost effective if risk
reduction is the desired goal.
This leads one to observe that this
program is inefficient, ineffective, and
inequitable at best, and failed at worst.
The current effort of the banks and other
commercial lenders to escape the
liability net, followed closely by
municipalities, is indicative of the
disruptive impacts the program is having
on our economy.
So who should pay? Perhaps a better
question is, "how much should we pay?"
If this program were one of reasoned
action proportional to risk, with
emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness,
the burden of the liability standard
would be considerably reduced. Most
PRPs are willing to step up to doing the
right thing in a rational way.
In the 1986 amendments to the
Superfund law, Congress sought to take
advantage of this willingness on the part
of PRPs by adding certain provisions
intended to add flexibility to the liability
standard (mixed funding, de minimi's
settlement provisions, and non-binding
allocations). However, these tools are
used sparingly, if at all; instead, the
emphasis is increasingly on
"enforcement first," with joint and
several liability for "deep pocket" PRPs.
PRPs who have been at the forefront in
trying to help make the program work
are seeing more of their limited resources
and goodwill consumed by conflict with
other parties, program inefficiency, and
unjustified remedies; a growing danger is
that these firms may decide to join those
who have chosen to "lie in the weeds"
and let the program flounder.
Last year's reauthorization
appropriately put off debate until the
next Congress, but it's not too soon to
begin a dialogue on how this program
can be revitalized and made more
cost-effective. Industry has accepted the
responsibility to take appropriate action
at hazardous sites which require
remediation. If we're going to spend the
money, however, let's get timely,
cost-effective results. All three parts of
the Superfund triad need strengthening:
liability, selection of remedy, and project
execution.
[Mullins is Vice President for Regulatory
Affairs at the Chemical Manu/acturers
Association.)
36
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Paul R. Portney
Everyone agrees that fairness, or
equity, is a desirable attribute of any
public policy proposal. Yet in debates
about Superfund, both the proponents of
a radical restructuring of the law and its
most ardent defenders argue their
respective cases largely on grounds of
fairness. How can this be?
Like beauty, equity is in the eye of the
beholder. The current Superfund law
imposes retroactive, strict joint and
several liability on those who generated
hazardous substances in the past, as well
as on those who owned or operated
waste disposal sites or even transported
wastes to those sites. Depending on one's
conception of equity, both the current
law and conceivable alternatives to
it—including a "public works" approach
that would eliminate liability altogether
for at least some sites addressed by
Superfund—could be defended on
grounds of fairness. This paradox
deserves explanation, and it makes sense
to begin with a quick rundown of
differing notions of fairness.
Let Me Count the Ways
Fairness can be interpreted in a number
of ways. In the environmental arena, one
popular interpretation is embodied in the
so-called polluter pays principle, long a
favorite of economists. Put bluntly, this
principle says that if you create a
problem, it's your job to clean it up.
A second conception of fairness relates
to ability to pay. This is the familiar
notion, reflected in our tax code, that the
more economically advantaged among us
should shoulder a proportionately larger
share of the tax burden than the less
fortunate. This sometimes enters into
environmental policy in the form of
"economic achievability" constraints on
source-discharge standards (i.e.,
discharge standards must be
"affordable," meaning that profitable
firms and/or industries may be asked to
do more than economic laggards).
A third conception of fairness is
sometimes called the benefit principle; it
holds that those who derive the benefit
from a particular policy action ought to
pay a healthy share of the costs.
The fourth and final conception of
fairness I want to discuss is harder to
hang a name on: Perhaps best described
as transilional equity, it reflects the
notion that sharp reversals in policy,
particularly changes that apply
retroactively, should be avoided
whenever possible.
No doubt there are still other
conceptions of fairness—for instance,
ones related to decision-making
procedures—but the four identified here
are the most prominent. So how does
Superfund—and possible alternatives to
it—square up against these differing
notions?
By its defenders, and many others as
well, Superfund is seen as a
polluter-pays statute in principle. When
responsible parties can be identified,
liability is imposed upon those whose
activities contributed in one way or
another to the creation of a problem site.
In fact, where good records exist on
"who disposed of what and where?"
liability can be imposed in proportion to
the volume and/or toxicity of each
contribution. In this regard, then,
Superfund seems consistent with the
previous applications of polluter-pays
that run throughout U.S. environmental
policy.
In practice, however, the case for
Superfund as a polluter-pays law is less
clear. First, EPA has in some cases
pursued a few wealthy, or
"deep-pocketed," firms (against whom
EPA felt it had a strong enforcement
case) for a large share of clean-up costs
while declining to pursue other parties
believed to have also contributed to
problem sites. Moreover, Superfuiul
liability can apply to individuals or
companies that acquired property from
(or, in some cases, even lent money to}
those upon whom initial liability was
assigned. Thus, some "responsible
parties" clearly had no role whatsoever
in the creation of problem sites.
Similarly, municipalities that owned
and operated their own dumpsites, or
contributed wastes to privately owned
sites, occasionally find themselves on the
hook for clean-up costs—despite the fact
that citizen-taxpayers do not like to think
of themselves as polluters. Finally, that
portion of the trust fund that comes from
the tax on chemical and petroleum
feedstocks and the corporate profits tax
has no necessary connection to the
creation over the past century or so of
abandoned waste sites.
This raises the question whether the
present Superfund really does get at
those who benefitted from the overlv
casual waste disposal practices of the
past. In one sense, we who purchased
the products made by companies now
being held liable for clean-up costs
derived some benefit because we paid
less than we would have if present
disposal standards had been in place.
The same goes for stockholders in those
companies since they presumably
enjoyed greater returns than they would
otherwise have earned. Finally, with
respect to municipal involvement,
residents of the communities benefitted
since they paid less in property and
income taxes as a result of lax disposal
practices. In other words, to paraphrase
Pogo, in part "the enemy is us." This
complicates judgments about the
applicability of the polluter-pays
principle.
What about Superfund and the
ability-to-pay principle? If, as some
critics allege, Superfund has become a
hunt for "deep pockets," this may strike
others as justifiable on ability-to-pay
grounds. This would be especially true if
EPA began using joint and several
liability more aggressively by focussing
its efforts at each site on one or two
profitable corporations (regardless of
their contribution to the problem),
forcing them in turn to recover funds
from other responsible parties through
court actions.
Yet such an approach should set off at
least one red warning light. If hazardous
substance policy comes to be directed
mainly at the most profitable companies,
it will create a powerful disincentive to
competitive success. Do we really want
to establish the precedent that
inefficient, unprofitable companies will
be asked to do little in the way of site
cleanups, while their more successful
counterparts will be assigned
disproportionately large shares of these
costs? I think not, and we must keep this
potentially perverse incentive in mind as
we ponder the future of Superfund.
How does Superfund look when
measured against the beneficiary-pays
conception of equity? Not very good, but
for a very sound reason: There was never
any intention in Superfund to make
those living around waste sites bear the
clean-up burden (although in some cases,
states pay for 10 percent of the cost of
cleanups within their borders). Thus, it
is not surprising that Superfund does not
do well in terms of the beneficiary-pays
approach.
Superfund does most poorly perhaps
when evaluated against norms of
transitional equity. Because the 1980 law
explicitly imposed retroactive liability on
firms and individuals, it rankles many.
This is particularly true for those who
felt they had been exercising all due care
in the past with respect to the wastes
they were storing on site or sending to
JULY/AUGUST 1991
37
-------
Bill Roberts
landfills or other facilities. To be told in
1980 that actions taken decades earlier,
perfectly legal at the time, were now
grounds for substantial new liabilities
struck them as quite unfair. Proponents
recognized this, of course, but saw no
way to raise the requisite off-budget
revenues for cleanups without retroactive
liability.
Alternative Approaches
What about other approaches to
financing site cleanups, including those
which would not rely so heavily on
retroactive, strict joint and several
liability? Could any of those satisfy all
four conceptions of fairness described
above?
It seems unlikely. Suppose, for
instance, that all site cleanups had to be
financed out of general revenues or with
the proceeds from some kind of national
tax designed to generate a trust fund. As
soon as the fund cleaned up even one
site that had been owned and operated
continuously by a single company, it
would probably be criticized as having
violated the polluter-pays principle. In
other words, a no-fault clean-up system
is a direct departure from polluter-pays;
this would be so even if the trust fund
were generated by taxes on firms that
generate today's hazardous substances,
because these firms are not necessarily
responsible for the problems of the past.
For reasons identified above, heavy
reliance on ability-to-pay to generate a
trust fund for site remediation would
probably meet with resistance: Why
should the burden fall most heavily on
the most profitable corporations,
especially if they were not involved in
the creation of the problems? Similarly,
asking those in the vicinity of Superfund
sites to shoulder all the clean-up burden
would seem unfair. After all, products
produced in one location are often sold
nationally. In a sense, then, consumers
everywhere paid less than they would
have if waste handling practices had
been better in the past. Should they not
contribute in part to the remediation of
the Superfund legacy with which we are
dealing?
Consider, finally, the implications for
transitional equity of a fundamental
redirection in Superfund. While the
original imposition of retroactive liability
struck many individuals, municipalities,
and corporations as unfair, a great many
of them have entered into agreements
with EPA and begun to remediate
sites—often at great expense. Would they
not have a right to object to a shift
toward a no-fault system if it did not
reimburse them for expenses incurred
under the current Superfund? Thus, even
changes in a system with which
everyone is unhappy may leave some
feeling hard-done-by if they have made
an effort to live with it while others have
not.
Conclusion
My contribution to this forum has
focused on fairness. But there are other
criteria by which we judge
environmental policies, some of which
conflict with fairness or equity. My point
is that if fairness were our only criterion
in judging Superfund and possible
alternatives to it, we would still have a
very difficult job in deciding whether, if
at all, to make fundamental changes in
that law.
(Portney is Vice President and Senior
FelJow a( Resources for (he Future.]
7-0
MCA
©
^^uperfund is unquestionably the
\Jmost effective and important
environmental program on the books."
That statement is not from an
environmentalist or EPA official, but
from a friend who has worked for years
as a corporate lawyer handling
transactions between businesses. He
rarely contacts EPA, couldn't name an
EPA contractor if you paid him, and has
no real conception of the complex issues
involving clean-up standards or EPA
settlement policies.
So, why does this corporate lawyer
have such a high regard for Superfund?
In a phrase: strict joint and several
liability.
Superfund is not nice to polluters. It is
not a polluter bail-out program. It is not
iff*—
'We come in peace. Where's the landfill?"
Reprinted ivith permission. NEA, INC.
38
EPA JOURNAL
-------
a public works program. It was designed
to operate on a very simple premise: The
polluter should pay, not the taxpayer.
And corporate America has gotten the
message.
Across the country, businesses now
scrutinize their waste management
activities. They spend millions of dollars
to carefully manage their wastes and,
more importantly, to change their
production practices to reduce the waste
they generate in the first place.
They clean up old contamination on
their property to make their businesses
more attractive to potential purchasers
and more dependable to financial
institutions looking for reliable collateral.
My corporate lawyer friend showed me a
60-page, single-spaced questionnaire
prepared by his firm, to be completed by
any company his clients may be
interested in purchasing. An
environmentalist could not have
produced a more thorough audit. And all
this goes on without a single EPA
employee in sight.
This makes Superfund one of the least
bureaucratic and most cost-effective
federal environmental programs. Using
Superfund liability as an incentive for
environmentally sound conduct requires
no new volumes to the Code of Federal
Regulations, no EPA time devoted to
regulatory development, and no lengthy
delays in implementation.
It also gives industry the flexibility to
find the least expensive measures to
reduce the threat of contamination. If
that means changes in production
practices, fine. If it means cleaning a
leaking landfill before hazardous
substances migrate into ground water,
fine. With Superfund cleanups costing
an average of $20 to 30 million, the
business community has worked hard to
find lower cost methods to reduce
pollution, lower the risk of
contamination, and avoid expensive
clean-up costs. The business community
has found that it is cheaper to avoid
creating a Love Canal in the first place
than to clean it up afterwards. That's
good for business and good for the
environment.
How does Superfund's liability
standard produce this kind of behavior?
Essentially, Superfund closes the legal
loopholes polluters could use to avoid
paying clean-up costs. First, Superfund
denies polluters the "I tried my best"
defense. By adopting a strict liability
standard, which means that polluters
must pay without regard to fault,
Congress invoked a well-established legal
doctrine to force polluters to pay for
cleanups.
Although it may seem like a tough test,
strict liability is hardly novel. For
centuries, the courts have applied this
test to anyone involved in
"ultra-hazardous" activities, such as
handling dangerous explosives. In
Congress' view, if a company generated
hazardous substances, it should be
prepared to pay for the consequences.
On a practical level, this standard also
made it possible for EPA to avoid the
cumbersome and oftentimes
overwhelming task of proving that a
polluter acted negligently in
contaminating ground water or posing
other threats to human health or the
environment. And more importantly, it
sent a signal to potential polluters that
making "best efforts" would not be a
defense if their wastes caused
contamination.
Second, Superfund liability borrows
another well-established legal principle
by imposing liability jointly and
severally among polluters. Congress
recognized that many contaminated sites
contained the commingled wastes of
many companies and that it would be
virtually impossible for EPA to prove
who caused what. To avoid protracted
legal fights between EPA and polluters
and to speed clean-up activities,
Congress allowed the imposition of
liability as long as EPA could identify
one or more of the responsible polluters.
Those identified by EPA have always
been free to search out other responsible
parties and, through legal action, compel
them to pay their fair share of clean-up
costs. But the time and cost of this
litigation was borne by the polluters, not
by taxpayers.
So why is a program that has
accomplished so much with a minimum
of command-and-control intervention
been subjected to such harsh criticism?
Before answering this question, it's
important to identify the critics. They
don't seem to be in Congress. Congress
passed Superfund with its "polluter
pays" liability system in 1980, continued
it in 1986, and reauthorized it for
another five years in 1990.
The most active, current effort to
amend the liability scheme in Superfund
has been in the narrow area of lender
liability. But, even the most vocal
advocates of change in this area have
made it clear that they have no interest
in abandoning Superfund's current
liability system altogether.
One can only conclude that the
Administration feels the same way.
Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush have
each signed Superfund legislation that
enacted and preserved the Superfund
liability system.
Dozens of state governments have
passed "mini" Superfund statutes that
have similar liability programs. It would
appear that legislators on the state level
feel just as strongly as the federal
government about forcing the polluters to
pick up the clean-up tab.
And let's not forget the American
people. In one public survey after
another, the public rates the management
of hazardous and toxic waste as one the
nation's top environmental priorities.
More importantly, a national survey
conducted by the Environment Opinion
Study, Inc., last year found that 70
percent of the public disapproves of the
way industry and business have
attempted to preserve and protect the
environment. Clearly, the American
people have not lessened their
commitment to see the "polluter pay."
Sadly, but predictably, the critics of
the Superfund liability program are the
polluters themselves. They complain
about high "transaction costs" and legal
fees, even though no one has quantified
those costs, much less compared them to
taxpayers' savings under the current
program.
They complain about the potential
reach of joint and several liability but
find it hard to present data to show real
instances of unfairness.
They assert that a tax-based public
works program should replace the
liability program, but we hear only
silence when we ask who will support a
sufficient tax (i.e., the "T" word).
And they complain that Superfund's
retroactive liability makes business pay
for mismanagement which occurred
years ago, although they don't explain
why the taxpayers should pay to clean
up industry's old Superfund sites.
When the dust settles on this issue, we
still face the challenging task of cleaning
up our soils and ground water to make
them safe for our families and our
children. It's a costly, time-consuming,
and difficult task. And, although
Superfund is hardly a perfect program,
its liability system will help us clean up
these sites more quickly, discourage the
creation of future sites, and keep
taxpayer costs to a minimum, a
(Roberts is Legislative Director for the
Environmental Defense Fund in
Washington, DC.]
JULY/AUGUST 1991
39
-------
Innovations in the
Clean-up Battle
The toxic shell game has given way to
treatment in place.
AWD AquaDetox/SVE System:
Simultaneously treats ground water
and soil gas in closed loop system that
eliminates air emissions. Proprietary
moderate-vacuum steam stripping
tower removes organics from ground
water; soil vapor extraction (SVE)
system removes soil gas for
subsequent treatment with granular
activated carbon beds.
by John H. Skinner
In 1980, when the Superfund program
began, the technologies available to
clean up hazardous waste sites
involved either reburial or
containment of the waste on-site or
shipment of the waste off-site to an
incinerator or landfill. The authors of
the original Superfund law must have
believed these technologies were
adequate to do the job because they
rejected proposals to include research
and development provisions in the
legislation. Consequently, there was
little attempt to develop better
solutions.
This was very shortsighted, as early
experience showed. For the first six
years, the Superfund program
struggled to apply limited and often
inadequate technologies to some very
complex and difficult clean-up
problems.
The 1986 amendments to Superfund
changed this picture and allowed EPA
to develop the Superfund Innovative
Technology Evaluation (SITE) Program.
The objective of the SITE Program is to
stimulate development and use of
innovative clean-up technologies that
destroy or detoxify wastes or
permanently reduce their volume or
mobility. The program has helped
widen the range of available
technologies for site cleanup, resulting
in the application of environmentally
better, cost effective solutions.
The Early Years: "Hold'em or
Run'em"
Anyone who has attempted to seal a
leaky basement at home can
understand the frustrations of
attempting to block the flow of liquids
through soil. In the early 1980s, a
widely used clean-up method involved
trying to hold hazardous wastes on site
through the use of various containment
(Dr. Skinner is EPA's Deputy Assistant
Administrator/or Research and
Development.]
AOST£4-So//Tecb
Anaerobic Thermal
Processor (ATP): Rotary
kiln desorbs organics
from soil and sludges in
four separate thermal
zones. Reagents
sprayed on
contaminated soil break
down chlorinated
compounds (such as
PCBs) during process.
devices. Slit trenches were dug around
the contaminated areas and filled with
cement-like material to form slurry
walls or grout curtains to block
contaminant spread. Ground water was
redirected by installing wells which
would be pumped counter to the flow
direction. Wastes were excavated and
reburied on liners composed of
compacted soil or plastic membranes.
Caps or covers were placed over
wastes to prevent rainwater
infiltration.
These containment devices are often
very difficult to install properly in the
field. Sometimes they impede
contaminant flow only temporarily.
Over time they can break down, or the
contaminants can simply find an
alternate route around or under them.
While these techniques are still used
today, they require long-term
monitoring and maintenance to ensure
proper operation.
A second site clean-up method used
in the early years involved shipping
hazardous wastes off-site to other
facilities. However, these facilities
were often inadequately designed and
operated because the hazardous waste
regulatory program under the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act
(RCRA) was not yet fully in place.
Many of these facilities were closed
down in later years because they could
not meet the requirements necessary to
receive a federal operating permit. This
practice of running wastes off-site was
labeled the "toxic shell game" by the
press and often met hostile opposition
from citizens in the receiving
communities.
It was against this backdrop of waste
management practices that Congress
reconvened in the mid-1980s to
consider the future of Superfund.
1986: Enter SARA and SITE
With new authority granted by the
Superfund Amendments and
Reauthorization Act of 1986, EPA
established the SITE Program. The
40
EPA JOURNAL
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'A
?£
/
program works to accelerate the
development, demonstration, and use
of new treatment technologies for
Superfund cleanup. Under the SITE
Program, innovative waste-treatment
technologies are evaluated and
demonstrated at full scale at actual
Superfund sites. The purpose is to
obtain reliable data on the performance
and costs of operating these
technologies.
The SITE Program is a public-private
partnership where the costs and
monetary risks are shared by EPA and
the technology developers. The
technology developer pays for the
design and construction of the
technology and must bring it to the
Superfund site, install it, and operate
it during the demonstration period.
EPA pays for the evaluation of the
technology, including the collection
and analysis of chemical samples. EPA
also prepares the final evaluation
report, which describes how well the
technology worked and presents all of
the data collected. This information is
sent to EPA regional staff, who use it
when selecting technologies at other
sites.The SITE Program also supports
the evaluation of emerging
technologies that are not yet ready for
full-scale demonstration by supporting
tests at the bench-scale and pilot-plant
level. Innovative methods for
monitoring and taking measurements
at Superfund sites are also evaluated.
The program includes extensive
technology transfer activities to
disseminate data to environmental
managers in governmental agencies,
the engineering community, industry,
and the public.
A Witch's Brew of Chemical Soup
Superfund sites contain complex
chemical mixtures of hazardous
substances in many different physical
forms. Such wastes include, for
example, lagoons or ponds filled with
sludge and oils, large areas of soil that
have been contaminated with heavy
metals and solvents, contaminated
ground water where wastes have
leaked below the water table, and
assorted debris such as old barrels and
tanks that contain remnants of
hazardous substances. The physical
and chemical properties of these
wastes vary considerably. Some bind
tightly to soil particles. Others dissolve
in ground water. Some volatilize into
the air. Others sink to the bottom of
underground aquifers.
Wastes at Superfund sites include
both organic and inorganic toxic
contaminants. Organic substances
contain carbon molecules, often in
combination with hydrogen, oxygen,
and chlorine molecules linked together
in long chains or ring structures. The
resulting chemicals have intimidating
names such as
polychlorinated-biphenols (PCBs) and
tetrachlorinated-dibenzo-dioxin (or
more simply, dioxin). Inorganic
substances include toxic heavy metals
such as lead, mercury, and cadmium.
There are a number of technologies
that can be used to treat Superfund
wastes, depending on the
contaminants present and the
characteristics of the waste and the
site. Often it is necessary to use these
technologies in combination with each
other in what are called "treatment
trains" to deal with the mixtures of
chemical substances present. For
example, a waste mixture containing
heavy metals and organic materials
might be treated by first removing,
concentrating, and recovering the
metals and then degrading or
destroying the organic matter.
Sometimes the waste components need
to be separated from each other before
they can be properly treated.
Therefore, it is very important to
develop a full set of technologies and
put together marriages that will deal
with the different possibilities.
Examples of some relatively new
technology options are presented in
the box accompanying this article.
For Information,
Look in the ATTIC.
The heart of the SITE Program's
technology transfer system is the
Alternative Treatment Technology
Information Center (ATTIC). ATTIC is
an EPA-developed information
retrieval network that provides
up-to-date information on innovative
treatment methods for hazardous
wastes. ATTIC offers an online
information system that is accessible
JULY/AUGUST 1991
41
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by any personal computer equipped
with communications software and a
modem. There is a telephone link to a
hotline-system operator who can assist
users who do not have access to a
computer. There is also a reference
library with hard copies of all
reference material. ATTIC carries out a
variety of outreach activities such as
technical assistance, education and
training, and dissemination of
information packets and user bulletins.
The ATTIC database now holds over
1,500 records with information on
innovative waste-treatment
technologies. It not only contains all
available reports from the SITE
Program but considerable other
information, including:
• Superfund Records of Decision—the
recommended remedy for 465 site
cleanups
• Removal actions—technologies used
for 175 removal actions at Superfund
sites
• U.S. Army data—90 records of
innovative clean-up technologies used
at Department of Defense sites
• State data—including 110 records
from the California Treatment
Technologies Program
• International information—including
data from the NATO research program
and reports from various international
conferences
• Reports on innovative technologies
from EPA's Office of Research and
Development—delisting actions under
RCRA that used innovative treatment,
treatability study data, and other
reports.
Since starting operation in January
1990, ATTIC has received over 4,500
calls either through the online
computer link or the systems operator.
ATTIC, currently averaging nearly 700
calls a month, has 625 registered users
(25 percent from the federal
government, 10 percent from state
governments, and 65 percent from the
private sector). Best of all, ATTIC is
free. The system operator is available
at (301)-816-9153, Monday through
Friday, between 8:30 and 4:30 (Eastern
time). Call often and share your
innovative technology data and
information.
The Bottom Line
Is the SITE Program meeting its goal of
stimulating the development and
42
commercialization of innovative waste
treatment technology? Let's look at the
data and see. There are currently 56
technologies in the SITE
demonstration program, 30
technologies in the emerging
pilot-scale evaluation program, and 15
technologies in the innovative
monitoring and measurement program.
A wide range of treatment technologies
is being evaluated, some of which are
thermal treatment, solidification and
stabilization, bioremediation, chemical
treatment, soil washing, in-situ
extraction, and various combinations
of other technologies. To date, 20
full-scale treatment technology
demonstrations have been completed,
and 18 more will be finished by the
end of fiscal year 1991. This represents
a tremendous amount of new
information available on the
performance and costs of innovative
technologies.
The commercial accomplishments
reported by technology developers
participating in the program are an
important measure of success of the
SITE Program. Are SITE technologies
actually being selected for clean-up
jobs after they successfully complete
the program? The answer clearly is
yes. One developer of a vacuum
extraction technology has reported
over 100 new clean-up jobs after the
SITE evaluation. The developers of the
20 SITE technologies who have
completed demonstration projects have
reported a total of 50 new clean-up
jobs. These jobs are not only under
Superfund but also under the RCRA
program, the underground storage tank
program, and state and
private party-sponsored projects. The
future business potential for SITE
developers is also quite promising. The
developers for the 20 completed SITE
demonstrations have been invited to
submit data for over 300 future
clean-up projects.
I believe that the SITE Program has
done much more than just provide
business opportunities for its
participants. It has acted as a catalyst
that has stimulated innovative
technology development and
commercialization across the field.
When a SITE project is successful,
developers of similar technologies
benefit from that success. Working
with the results from SITE projects,
EPA and state clean-up officials can
ask the right questions and make
decisions with more confidence. The
Superfund program reports that, since
the 1986 amendments were passed,
innovative treatment technologies have
been selected for nearly 50 percent of
the clean-up jobs.
I believe the $65 million that has
been invested to date in the SITE
Program will have tremendous
leverage. Decision making will be
improved at thousands of sites in the
United States and internationally.
Billions of clean-up dollars will be
better spent. Technology will advance
through this small but wise investment
in research, o
Innovative Clean-Up
Technologies
Vacuum Extraction
and Soil Washing
Vacuum extraction is a technique for
removing volatile compounds (VOCs)
from soils. This is carried out in situ
(meaning that the soils are not
excavated but treated in place).
Extraction wells are installed in the
contaminated soil with a vacuum-tight
seal near the surface. A vacuum
applied to the extraction wells sucks
the volatile compounds from the soil.
The contaminated air stream is then
filtered through carbon before release to
the atmosphere.
The process has been successfully
applied to a variety of soils, silts, sand,
and gravel. The process is more
efficiently and easily applied to gravels
and sands. The soil must be porous for
vacuum extraction to work well. If the
porosity of the soil is small, too little
space will be available for air to flow,
and the extraction process will not
work.
The demonstration of vacuum
extraction at the Groveland Wells
Superfund site in Massachusetts
removed nearly 600 kilograms of
trichloroethylene, an industrial
chemical, during a 56-day operational
period.
Soil washing can be used to remove
contaminants from soil with a washing
fluid. Water, organic solvents,
surfactants, acids, and bases have all
been used to wash soils. The fluid is
added to excavated soils, which are
screened and washed in a series of
rotating vessels. After washing, the
washing fluid must be treated in a
wastewater treatment facility.
Soil washing can remove heavy
metals and organics from sandy soil.
EPA has successfully used the solvent
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Exhaust Stack
Plasma Reactor Process
Contaminated soil enters through feeder.
Plasma torch creates molten bath which
detoxifies contaminants. Reactor well
rotates to transfer heat evenly; centrifugal
force holds material in well. Organics
remaining in gases are destroyed in
secondary chamber; acid gases and
particulates are treated downstream.
ethylene-diamine-tetraacetic acid to
remove lead from contaminated soil at
Superfund sites. But soil washing is not
as effective for clay soils. The clay
bonds the contaminants more
tenaciously, so they are much harder to
remove.
A pilot test of the soil washing
system was conducted at the MacGillis
and Gibbs Superfund site in Minnesota.
A mobile pilot system removed 90
percent of the pentachlorophenol, a
chemical used for wood preservation,
from the contaminated soil.
Chemical Treatment:
KPEG and BCD
Chemical treatment processes alter the
chemical structure of the wastes to
produce a residual that is less
hazardous than the original waste.
There are many examples of chemical
treatment; two of the newest and most
innovative were developed by
researchers in EPA's Office of Research
and Development and are referred to by
the acronyms KPEG and BCD.
KPEG gets its name from the
chemical reactant fluid that is used to
treat the waste: potassium polyethylene
glycolate (potassium's chemical symbol
is K). The KPEG process involves
mixing the waste and KPEG reactant in
a heated reactor for up to five hours,
depending on the type and
concentration of the contaminants.
When used on chlorinated wastes such
as PCBs, dioxins, and chlorophenols,
the KPEG process removes the chlorine
molecules, making the waste less
hazardous.
The KPEG technology was
demonstrated on 20 tons of
contaminated soil at a U.S. Navy site in
Guam. The PCB concentrations in these
soils were reduced from 3,000 parts per
million (ppm) to 2 ppm (1 ppm means
1 gram of PCB contained in one million
grams of soil). However, significant
quantities of reactant had to be used,
and this was expensive. Also the
treatment took four to six hours and
had to be repeated several times.
Base-catalyzed decomposition (BCD)
is another technology for removing
chlorine molecules from organic
substances. While BCD is not yet
commercially available, the preliminary
research is very promising. Like the
KPEG process, BCD requires the
addition of a reagent to the
contaminated soils and heating of the
material for the reaction. Instead of
large quantities of reagent, however, the
BCD process requires only 1 to 5
percent reagent by weight. The reagent
is also much less expensive than the
KPEG reagent.
Laboratory and bench-scale tests have
demonstrated the ability of this
technology to reduce PCB
concentrations from 4,000 ppm to less
than 1 ppm. This year the U.S. Navy
will be applying this technology at a
site in Guam where one to two tons per
hour of contaminated soil will be
treated.
Thermal Treatment
Thermal treatment uses high
temperatures to destroy hazardous
wastes. Well-run thermal treatment
processes can completely destroy
organic waste in a matter of seconds.
Several types of thermal-treatment
technologies exist—the main
differences being in the design of the
primary combustion chamber.
Rotary kiln incinerators are slightly
inclined cylinders in which wastes are
injected at the top and tumble and burn
as the kiln slowly rotates. Infrared
furnaces pass electrical power through
carbide heating elements to generate
thermal radiation. A fluidized bed
combustor uses a vessel containing a
hot bed of inert sand-like material that
is floated by high-velocity air. In all
cases, high temperatures and thorough
mixing improve the combustion
process.
After exiting the primary chamber,
combustion gases continue to burn in a
second chamber in order to assure
complete combustion. The gases then
flow through scrubbers, filters, or other
air-pollution control devices before
being exhausted to the atmosphere.
Thermal treatment systems are
widely available in the United States.
Several years ago, EPA's Office of
Research and Development built and
operated a prototype mobile rotary kiln
incinerator and demonstrated its
feasibility. Today, several mobile
thermal treatment units are
commercially available.
Thermal destruction units will be
less effective if the wastes to be treated
have a high moisture content. Also high
concentrations of halogenated
compounds (chlorine, fluorine, or
bromine) and metals (arsenic, mercury,
or lead) will increase the air-pollution
cleaning requirements. Properly
operated thermal treatment processes
can destroy or remove more than 99.99
percent of the toxic organic compounds
in wastes.
Bioremediation
Waste-degrading microbes or
microorganisms exist virtually
everywhere in the natural environment.
In fact, microorganisms are Mother
Nature's own clean-up crew. When
living species such as trees, plants, or
people die, naturally occurring
microorganisms degrade the organic
matter into carbon dioxide and water. If
it were not for microorganisms, the
world would be cluttered with organic
matter from the past. Bioremediation
attempts to harness the waste-degrading
capability of microorganisms and use it
to destroy toxic organic substances
found in hazardous waste.
Continued on next page
JULY/AUGUST 1991
43
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Bioreactor Processing System
Contaminated water
enters mix tank
where acid level is
adjusted and inorganic
nutrients are added.
After heating, water
flows to reactor where
microorganisms
degrade contaminants
to carbon dioxide,
water, and chloride
ions. Effluent is then
discharged.
Often, waste-degrading
microorganisms exist right at a
Superfund site. Their natural
capabilities can be enhanced by adding
oxygen, nutrients such as nitrogen or
phosphorous, or other microorganisms
cultured in a laboratory. If the waste is
first excavated, it may be biodegraded
in a reactor vessel. Alternatively,
bioremediation may take place in situ
to biodegrade contaminated soils and
groundwater in place. In situ
bioremediation is often used in
conjunction with a ground-water
pumping and reinjection system to
circulate nutrients and oxygen through
a contaminated aquifer and associated
soils.
Biodegradation must occur within a
very specific range of physical
parameters. If the moisture content,
temperature, oxygen content, nutrient
content, or pH vary outside the range
used by the target population of
microorganisms, biodegradation will
slow down or halt. In addition,
sometimes the concentration of the
contaminants in the soils will be toxic
to the microorganisms, again stopping
the treatment process. The need to
regulate these parameters requires close
monitoring of the treatment system.
Some very promising research is
underway on adding methane gas as a
supplement. When the microorganisms
degrade the methane, the contaminants
are degraded at the same time
(microbiologists call this
"co-metabolism").
Biological treatment systems have
been used to treat soils contaminated
with pentachlorophenol, creosote, oils,
gasoline, and pesticides, A
microbiological system tested at the
MacGillis and Gibbs site in Minnesota
successfully reduced 60- to 100-ppm
levels of pentachlorophenol to less than
5 ppm in the treated water.
Bioremediation was also successfully
used in Prince William Sound, Alaska,
to clean up over 100 miles of shoreline
contaminated by the Exxon VaJdez oil
spill.
Solidification and Stabilization
Solidification and stabilization
technologies treat wastes by reducing
the mobility of the pollutants. The
process either creates a solid mass
(solidification) or chemically binds the
contaminant to the solid particles
(stabilization).
Solidification and stabilization can be
performed in tanks and containers or in
situ. When these procedures are
performed in tanks, the wastes are
mixed with water and cement-based
reagents. The material is discharged
into a mold and allowed to cure to
form a solid. When the procedures are
performed in situ, the reagents are
mixed deep into the waste or soil,
using an auger.
Solidification and stabilization
technologies work best on wastes
contaminated with cadmium, copper,
chromium, lead, and zinc. This type of
technology has been shown to reduce
the mobility of these metals by 95
percent or more. High concentrations of
organic materials, cyanides, sulfates, or
oil and grease are likely to interfere
with the bonding of the reagents to the
soil particles.
In-situ solidification and stabilization
immobilized PCBs during a
demonstration project in Florida. Also,
using a reactor-based process at a site
in Pennsylvania, soils with up to 25-
percent organics were solidified and
heavy metals (lead and zinc) were
immobilized.
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From Know-How to Can-Do
EPA recognizes that the first time a
technology is tried, it may not work.
by Walter W. Kovalick, Jr.
HAZCON Solidification
Process: Contaminated
material is mixed with
Portland cement, a
patented additive, and
water. Mixture hardens
into a cohesive mass
that immobilizes
contaminants.
Shirco Infrared
Incineration System:
Organics are driven out
of soil in primary
combustion chamber,
then burned in a
secondary chamber.
Unit uses
electric-powered
infrared heat-source in
primary chamber.
(Dr. Kovalick is Director of EPA's
Technology Innovation Office.)
As a member of the consulting
engineering community noted at a
recent symposium, "We've been
building bridges and highways for
5,000 years and treating wastewater for
150 years, and we're still learning in
each of those areas. We've been trying
to clean up hazardous waste sites
through applications of technology for
a little more than 10 years." The point
of his remark was that hazardous
waste cleanup is a relatively young
business. It is new from the standpoint
of regulators, new from the standpoint
of the engineering community, and
new from the standpoint of developers
of treatment technologies.
Despite successful demonstrations of
new technologies through EPA's SITE
Program (see article on page 40) and
similar efforts in the states, the fact
remains that the development and
widespread application of technologies
for the cleanup of abandoned waste
sites and contaminated land are
inadequate. There is a long, bumpy
road between several weeks' operation
of a pilot plant and the
commercialization of new
technologies.
The Technology Innovation Office
(TIOj in EPA's Office of Solid Waste
and Emergency Response (OSWER)
was established to advocate innovation
among EPA and state staffs, consulting
engineering firms, American industry
in general, and the vendors who
develop these technologies. From our
vantage point, we see three major
hurdles—informational, regulatory,
and legal and institutional—in the way
of developing faster, better, cheaper,
and more publicly acceptable
treatment alternatives.
Information Barriers
The deveJoper of new technology faces
a fragmented market for soil and
ground-water cleanup driven largely
by industry response to regulatory
programs such as Superfund. The
variety of contaminants, soil types,
hydrogeological settings, and other
technical factors makes matching new
ideas with definable market needs very
difficult. Unlike marketing traditional
products to first-time buyers, in the
remediation field each solution is
custom-built due to unique site
circumstances. This uncertainty carries
over to the financial community,
which is reluctant to provide venture
capital. Complicating this scenario for
developers are the perceived and real
business risks of dealing with
hazardous substances and liability
concerns.
In terms of the eommerciaJization or
routine field application of these
JULY/AUGUST 1991
45
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technologies, there are additional
information barriers. Only seven of the
140 innovative technologies already
selected in the federal Superfund
program have been completed and
used. An additional 21 are being
installed or are operational. The
balance are in the design and
pre-design stage. The consulting
engineers who design projects have no
standard design documents to refer to;
they lack cost and performance data
with which they can assure their
clients—American industry and the
government overseers—of the efficacy
of these remedies. In many cases, they
are firms whose experience base
consists of decades of wastewater
treatment plant design. It is only in the
past five to seven years that they have
turned their attention to waste site
clean-up problems. While their clients
are used to guarantees of a certain
level of performance, the designers are
not empowered by the available
information to give such guarantees.
Having to deal with hazardous
substances while still observing
normal, conservative engineering
practices, complicates the situation.
Regulatory Impediments
Hazardous waste technology
development and its field application
are unique in the world of technical
advances. Both research and
development and operational activities
require a permit under the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act.
Designed as it is to prevent unsafe
releases when working with hazardous
wastes, the law sets up a barrier to
entrepreneurs unlike any other
technology development arena. One
could invent a new transportation
system, a revolutionary machine tool,
or a new manufacturing process in
quiet studied contemplation;
engineering flaws and rework would
probably be necessary. But one cannot
develop a new hazardous waste
treatment process and put hazardous
waste through it without a public
permitting process, financial
guarantees, and (perhaps more difficult
for the developer) a wait for approval
to test the equipment.
EPA has developed regulations for
research and development permits and
is encouraging states to include such
permitting in their regulations. A
federal exemption allows the testing of
small quantities of waste to assist
development.
The intergovernmental aspect of
permitting can also impede research
and development of treatment
processes. Even in the most
streamlined system, state and local
governments can choose to exercise
regulatory and permitting influence
over proposed projects.
Institutional Impediments
In addition to the uncertainty faced by
investors in these new technologies,
mentioned earlier, the buyers (i.e.,
American industry) are faced with a
new marketplace in which they must
depend on advice mediated by others.
Thus, even the technologies with good
demonstration data must be
understood well enough by an
engineering firm for them to
recommend the technologies in a
proposed design, and they must then
also be understood by the construction
firm that is going to build this
one-of-a-kind system for the client.
Faced with this tenuous chain of
experience and a desire not to pay
twice—once for the innovative
solution and then, when that doesn't
work, for an established
solution—there is an understandable
reluctance by buyers to pursue
innovation without demonstrable cost
savings.
Added to these marketplace realities
are extra layers of liability concern.
Beyond the normal negligence
concerns, with which the engineering
profession is used to dealing, are the
risks of designing a first-of-its-kind
remedy and having it fail, as well as
the potential third-party liabilities
stemming from people claiming
damage from an inadequately designed
remedy years after it was applied.
A Brighter Outlook
Despite these multidimensional
problems, progress is being made on
several fronts. TIO and others in EPA
are widely disseminating cost and
performance data to the government,
industry, and engineering
communities. In the interest of adding
certainty to the size and nature of the
market, several new electronic data
bases, regular newsletters, and an
increasing frequency of demonstration
results and studies are being targeted
to users with the greatest need in the
clean-up community.
To help lend more certainty to the
engineers' world, professional
engineering societies will be convened
to take a snapshot of the state of
technology development. TIO plans to
convene private industries and federal
agencies with clean-up problems to
consider joint technology
development.
State leadership in permitting of
new technology development is a
promising arena because it affords the
opportunity to deal comprehensively
at the local level with needed permits.
TIO is working with several states on
such an initiative for site remediation
technologies.
We are on the launch pad with a
number of new technologies for site
remediation. In three years, we should
see a quantum leap in information on
full-scale operation of some of these
technologies. That will pave the way
for articles on "second generation
developments," rather than on barriers
to beginning. Q
46
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Corrective Action:
Task with a Big Future
Wastes were commonly dumped
in the "back 40."
by Sylvia K. Lowrance
A petroleum refinery. A wide range of small and large industries treat, store, and
dispose of hazardous wastes under RCRA regulations.
For more than 200 years, the
industrial revolution has worked its
changes on the social and economic
fabric—and the landscape—of the
United States. Vast networks of
industrial facilities produce all the
enormously varied products of the
modern age. Inevitably, the production
and distribution of these products have
generated great quantities and varieties
of chemical sludges, ashes, used
solvents, and other industrial wastes.
Until very recently, these wastes
were commonly dumped into unlined
landfills and lagoons in the "back 40"
of manufacturing facilities. Not
surprisingly, many of these old
(Lowrance is Director of EPA's Office of
Solid Waste.]
industrial dumpsites have become
major environmental problems.
Although Superfund has captured
most of the public's attention regarding
toxic waste cleanup in recent years,
there are thousands of contaminated
industrial facilities that are outside the
jurisdiction of Superfund. (By its
mandate, Superfund targets for
long-term cleanup only those
abandoned or uncontrolled sites that
are on the National Priorities List, or
NPL.) Cleaning up these contaminated
industrial facilities has become largely
the work of a new clean-up program
under the Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (RCRA): the Corrective
Action program. Still in its early
stages, Corrective Action nevertheless
is becoming increasingly visible in
tackling a clean-up effort that
approaches Superfund in scope and
complexity.
Why Corrective Action?
Before the Hazardous and Solid Waste
Amendments of 1984, RCRA was
primarily a pollution prevention
statute, mandating a comprehensive,
stringent set of regulations prescribing
how industry must manage its newly
generated hazardous waste. In effect,
the RCRA regulations were designed to
prevent future Superfund sites from
happening.
But the legacy of the past remained a
problem in that contamination from
previous waste management (or
mismanagement) practices at these
industrial facilities was largely beyond
the reach of RCRA and EPA. The 1984
amendments changed this by giving
EPA broad new authorities to require
corrective action at facilities regulated
under RCRA. As a result, RCRA is
currently both a prevention and a
clean-up program.
RCRA and Superfund Compared
The Superfund and RCRA Corrective
Action programs are similar in a
number of ways, but there are
important differences. Both programs
share the same fundamental clean-up
objectives, and the progressive steps of
the Corrective Action process are
analogous to the steps followed in a
Superfund cleanup. (See article by Jack
Lewis on page 7.) However, rather
than the abandoned or uncontrolled
sites that are on the Superfund NPL,
RCRA-regulated facilities are most
often (but not always) properties with
active, ongoing manufacturing
operations. Unlike many Superfund
sites, RCRA facilities have identifiable
owners/operators.
The RCRA universe of facilities
includes a wide spectrum of industrial
operations that involve treating,
storing, and disposing of hazardous
wastes: petroleum refineries, iron and
steel mills, chemical plants,
automobile manufacturers, and many
others. Owners/operators of RCRA
facilities are often large Fortune 500
companies, but many others are small
"mom and pop" operations. In
addition, several hundred federal
facilities, primarily Defense and
Energy Department facilities, are
regulated under RCRA.
One fundamental difference between
the two clean-up programs has to do
with funding. Under RCRA, financial
responsibility for conducting technical
investigations and taking corrective
JULY/AUGUST 1991
47
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action to clean up a facility falls to the
facility owner/operator. Unlike
Superfund, there is no government
"fund" for financing cleanups under
RCRA.
The role played by the states is
another point of difference between
RCRA and Superfund. Whereas
Superfund is primarily a federally
administered program, RCRA
Corrective Action is designed to be
substantially delegated to the
individual states. To date, seven
states—Minnesota, Utah, Colorado,
Idaho, Illinois, Georgia, and
Texas—have been formally authorized
to run Corrective Action programs
under RCRA; many more states
conduct major aspects of the program
under cooperative agreements with
EPA.
As many as 4,000 RCRA-regulated
hazardous waste management facilities
may eventually need some type of
corrective action. These facilities vary
widely in the health and
environmental hazards they pose.
Many have relatively minor
contamination problems, while a
significant number may pose
environmental risks comparable to
major Superfund sites.
Status Report
Following the 1984 RCRA
amendments, the exigencies of
statutory deadlines consumed much of
EPA's resources, and the Corrective
Action program began slowly in its
early years. Since the late 1980s,
however, the program has swung into
action. Extensive national guidance
has been issued, and numerous facility
investigations and cleanups are
underway. To date, EPA and the states
have assessed more than 2,000 facility
sites for possible releases, and detailed
analyses, including extensive
monitoring for releases, have been
completed at more than 100 facilities.
An additional 100 facilities are now
carrying out remedies prescribed by
EPA; approximately a dozen remedies
have been completed.
While these figures testify to the
high level of activity within the
Corrective Action program, they also
show that the program is still in its
early phases. For the most part,
facilities are in the process of
identifying and characterizing releases.
Cleanup will take place in the future.
EPA's challenges in administering this
program, therefore, lie in moving
facilities efficiently into the clean-up
phase, streamlining the process so that
facilities can move quickly toward
acceptable goals, and focusing
resources first on the sites that are of
highest priority.
"Worst Sites First"
As with the Superfund program, one of
the Agency's major goals in managing
the Corrective Action program is to
address the "worst sites first." This
involves systematically surveying each
facility in the RCRA universe, targeting
old solid waste management units, and
determining how much actual or
potential environmental or human
health risk is posed by each. EPA
expects this survey effort to be
completed within the next two to three
years.
In view of the potential size of the
program, EPA has developed a new
computer-based system for assessing
corrective action priorities. This
system will enable us to group
facilities into broad priority categories
(high, medium, and low) and to target
facilities first with the most serious
environmental problems. Once a
facility has been identified as a high
priority for cleanup, EPA or the state
will take steps to initiate the cleanup
either by issuing an enforcement order
or by requiring clean-up measures
through the RCRA permitting process.
Despite various procedural and
administrative differences between the
RCRA and Superfund programs, the
basic remedial approach—identifying
and investigating releases, making
decisions on appropriate remedial
actions, and implementing those
actions—is essentially the same under
both programs. Even so, each facility
poses different environmental and
engineering challenges, and clean-up
decisions are highly site specific,
requiring considerable technical
judgment on the part of EPA and state
personnel. One of the long term goals
of the RCRA program is to develop
performance standards for site
cleanups that will provide a more
consistent, more streamlined
framework for remedial decision
making.
In addition to determining priorities
for facility cleanups, the Corrective
Action program is examining
approaches to maximize environmental
results at facilities, once contamination
problems have been identified.
Streamlining and focusing site studies
is one measure being emphasized.
Installing interim remedial measures to
stabilize releases and prevent
contamination problems from
worsening is another. The point is to
control, more quickly, the most serious
environmental problems at a large
number of facilities.
Corrective Action Rule Proposed
So far, EPA has conducted the
Corrective Action program based on
brief statutory language which
provides it with authority to require
studies and remediation. However, in
July 1990 EPA issued proposed rules
to formally define the process and
clean-up goals for the RCRA Corrective
Action program. The final rules are
expected to be published in 1993.
In the meantime, the Office of Solid
Waste is conducting a comprehensive
analysis of the costs and economic
impacts, and the environmental and
economic benefits, of cleaning up
RCRA facilities. The analysis will
consider how specific regulatory
provisions—and alternative
approaches—may affect the overall
costs and benefits of clean-up actions.
These analyses will focus on issues
such as the timing of cleanups, "points
of compliance" (i.e., where cleanup
must be achieved), how to establish
protective clean-up levels for
contaminants in ground water and
other media, and other "how clean is
clean" issues.
The results of this analysis, which
will be published next summer, are
expected to help shape Agency policy
and the final Corrective Action rule. In
the meantime, EPA's regions and the
states are continuing to implement the
program on a site-specific basis
through statutory permitting and
enforcement authorities.
Like Superfund, the RCRA
Corrective Action program faces
enormous challenges in the coming
years. EPA and the states will be
working with the regulated community
and the public in making difficult
clean-up decisions at thousands of
facilities. It will be a long-term effort.
And it will be the Agency's continuing
responsibility to establish clear
priorities for the program and to apply
the lessons of both RCRA and
Superfund as this important work
continues into the next decade, a
48
EPA JOURNAL
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Going Underground with UST
The goal is to have cleanup under way within 72 hours.
by June Taylor
It seemed so innocent: We'd all have
our own cars for convenient
commuting and weekend escapes. And
this country, inventor of the
automobile assembly line, would
prosper by selling advanced
four-wheel designs to the rest of the
world.
Alas, the dream didn't quite work
out. Air pollution and gridlocked
freeways have taken much of the
romance out of driving, and a number
of foreign manufacturers are
out-competing Detroit. And there is
still another cost of our protracted love
affair with the automobile—cleaning
up leaking underground storage tanks.
As the United States boomed in the
post-war years, producing millions of
cars and thousands of miles of
freeways to drive them on, a
nationwide network of service stations
sprang up, requiring storage systems to
fuel them. Millions of storage tanks
were placed underground. This
practice avoided dangers of fire and
explosion, but it also had a
disadvantage: It was hard to tell if
these underground storage tanks, or
USTs, were leaking.
A well-installed UST system
generally lasts 20 years or more, so
leakage problems, usually due to the
slow corrosion of buried steel tanks or
piping, took a while to materialize. But
when they did, the result was often
dramatic. Vapors from leaked gasoline
can travel underground, accumulating
in nearby basements to explosive
levels. In New Brunswick, Canada, an
entire city block was lost from the fire
following such an explosion. An entire
town's water supply can be
contaminated by one leaking tank.
Since half our population relies on
(Taylor is a communications consultant
who works for EPA's Office of
Underground Storage Tanks.)
JULY/AUGUST 1991
underground supplies for drinking
water, the potential threat is enormous.
A rash of contamination incidents
hit in the 1980s. These were delayed
ramifications of the UST building
boom two to three decades before;
many of the systems installed 20 and
30 years earlier were corroded and
leaking. In response to these incidents,
Congress passed Amendments to the
Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act (RCRA) in 1984, mandating EPA to
regulate most underground tanks
storing motor fuels and hazardous
chemicals. (Small farm tanks and all
heating oil tanks were exempted from
the federal law.)
The EPA's "Franchise" Approach
Congress handed EPA an enormous
challenge. In the middle of the Reagan
Administration, with its emphasis on
deregulation and reduced federal
spending, EPA was directed to set up a
new program affecting an enormous
number of businesses—some 750,000
facilities with approximately 1.8
million tanks.
Rather than trying to regulate
millions of tanks directly from
Washington, DC, or its 10 regional
offices, EPA adopted an approach that
built on state and local tank programs.
Several states had active tank programs
in place before Congress rewrote
RCRA. For example, California, a
perennial leader in developing
environmental regulations, had already
required double-walled tanks and
piping to protect the environment; in
Florida, where ground-water levels are
so high that many tanks sit in drinking
water supplies, several counties were
moving toward requiring double walls;
and many New England states were
well underway with regulations
somewhat less stringent than those in
California or Florida. Many fire
departments also had programs for
permitting and inspecting tanks on
installation or removal, although their
concern focused specifically on fire
and explosion dangers rather than on
environmental hazards.
EPA decided its job was to provide a
well-reasoned set of rules to define a
nationwide minimum standard for
protecting the environment from tank
leaks, while giving states or counties
with serious ground-water problems
the flexibility to impose more stringent
rules. EPA calls this the "franchise"
approach. Just as the headquarters
office of McDonald's or Century 21
does not sell hamburgers or houses,
EPA's Office of Underground Storage
4')
-------
Tanks does not put its own people in
the field to regulate tanks. And just as
McDonald's and Century 21 set
operating standards for an acceptable
franchise and establish research,
training, and advertising to foster their
success, EPA does the same for state
tank programs. In addition, EPA is able
to offer the additional carrot of some
federal grant money to help hire staff
and administer programs.
The Federal Tank Rules
EPA researched the primary causes of
UST leaks and spills and wrote rules
addressing them. The federal rules
took effect in 1988. Many parts were
phased in to allow owners time to
comply.
A majority of states have formally
adopted or are moving to adopt rules
that essentially mirror the federal
regulations. The five key areas in the
national rules are:
• Design and Construction: UST
systems must be protected from
corrosion.
• Leak Detection: All systems must
have leak detectors, with extra
requirements for piping (the source of
most leaks).
• Spill and Overfill: All systems must
have devices to prevent overfilling of
the tank and catch basins to hold small
spills from delivery hoses.
• Financial Responsibility: Tank
owners must have insurance or some
Mike GmiJiul photo. Mirfivest Research /nstilufe.
Students at EPA's "Soil Vapor Soot Camp" sample and analyze gasoline
tank leaks. The service station they are testing, on the University of
Connecticut-Storrs campus, was the scene of an actual leak.
other way of paying potential clean-up
costs and liability damages from a
leak.
• Cleanup: A leak or spill in excess of
25 gallons must be reported;
immediate action must be taken to
prevent fires or explosions, and
contaminated soils and ground water
must be cleaned up.
In most people's estimation, the first
three items on this list of EPA's tank
rules are reasonable without question.
There is a general recognition that we
need to improve tank systems, install
leak detectors, and pay a lot more
attention to the environmental
consequences of fuel storage. The
concerns center around the last two
items. A big worry of bankers,
insurance companies, and
environmental agencies is how to deal
with the potential costs of thousands
upon thousands of cleanups.
The Clean-up Dilemma
In 1986 Congress created an UST Trust
Fund to help with cleanups from the
thousands of abandoned tanks at
businesses that had failed during the
oil crises or ensuing recessions.
Through amendments to the
Superfund law, a small tax (.01 cent
per gallon) was put on gasoline to
create this fund. Each state receives a
portion of the fund to carry out
cleanups where no owner or
"responsible party" (RP) can be found
or where the RP is insolvent. States
also oversee cleanups where the
owner/RP is taking action.
Now, in the 1990s, with leak
detectors being installed nationwide,
the phones are ringing in state tank
offices. As of March 1991, states had
accumulated almost 110,000 reports of
"confirmed releases" or leaks, spills,
and overfills that will require
investigation and possibly a cleanup.
The federal law covers about 1.8
million underground tank systems.
EPA estimates some 15 to 20 percent
of these may have leaks now or may
leak in this decade. Tens of thousands
of sites will need cleanups of varying
magnitudes, some requiring significant
50
EPA JOURNAL
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New Approaches to
Cleanups
EPA is promoting alternatives to
the traditional "pump and treat"
clean-up approach in which
contaminated ground water is
pumped up, treated, and
discharged. This method is sjow
and expensive and does little to
remove the underlying source of
much of the contamination:
pockets of petroleum trapped in
the soil. The Agency is also
looking for faster ways to do
site assessments—the sampling
of soils and contaminants that
determine what kind of cleanup
is needed at a site.
Site Assessment Improvements
• Vapor Survey: Samples of
soil vapors are taken on site by
driving probes into the ground
and extracting contaminated
soil gas. Measuring the level of
contaminants (which can be
done on site) helps technicians
understand the severity of the
contamination and the direction
in which it is spreading. This
information is invaluable for
clean-up strategy.
• Lab-In-A-Bag is a field
measurement kit in which a
small water sample or soil
sample mixed with water is put
in a plastic zip-lock bag
connected to the kit's apparatus
and stirred for a specified time
to release the volatile
contaminants. The
contaminated air ("head space")
in the bag can then be measured
by a variety of devices (e.g.,
photo ionization detector, flame
ionization detector, portable gas
chromatograph, Draeger tube)
for analysis.
Lab-In-A-Bag provides a
standardized field procedure
with high quality results for less
time and money than laboratory
procedures. Decisions can be
made immediately on the safety
of drinking water. These new
kits, developed by In Situ
through an agreement with EPA,
will be available in late 1991.
Improved Cleanups
• Vacuum Extraction is a
process of vacuuming
contaminated vapors out of the
ground for treatment. Often
much less expensive than
"pump and treat" and more
effective at removing the source
contamination, its use is
sometimes limited by soil types
and porosity. Shell
Development Corporation,
through an agreement with EPA,
has produced an easy-to-use
computer program to help
decide if a site is a good
candidate for vacuum
extraction. EPA helped to
evaluate the program and is
now providing it to state
personnel. It is currently
available for Macintosh
computers only.
• SoiJ Gas Engine: This form
of vacuum extraction is now
being used in California. It
works by modifying a standard
car engine to run on propane
and setting it up at the site. The
engine pulls contaminated soil
vapors from underground as
part of its air intake.
Contaminants are burned along
with the propane; a catalytic
converter minimizes emissions.
• Free Product Filters: These
are filters through which
gasoline can pass, but not water.
A monitoring well is lined with
this filter. Then, instead of
pumping up a mixture of free
product (i.e., petroleum that is
floating on the ground water,
not trapped in or adhering to
the soil) and contaminated
water—which requires permits
and treatment systems—the
contractor pumps up nearly
pure fuel which can be used or
recycled. Says one contractor:
"Sometimes we run our trucks
on the stuff we pump up."
efforts to restore ground water.
These numbers appear staggering
compared to the nearly 1,200
Superfund sites currently on the
National Priority List or the roughly
4,000 RCRA hazardous waste sites
needing cleanup. Compared to
Superfund cleanups, UST actions are
cheap, ranging from $50,000 to $1
million depending on the extent
ofground-water contamination,
whereas the typical Superfund site
consumes $25 million. However,
because of the vast numbers of leaking
tank sites, costs could run in the
billions of dollars unless we use faster,
better, and cheaper clean-up methods.
Faster, Better, Cheaper
"FASTER, BETTER, CHEAPER
Cleanup": This refrain has become a
major theme for EPA's Office of
Underground Storage Tanks, which is
convinced the country can't afford to
deal with tens of thousands of
cleanups the old fashioned way. So
what to do?
The first step is to make sure
cleanups get underway quickly. Every
day of delay allows contamination to
spread, increasing the eventual
clean-up costs. Everyone knows this,
but often bureaucratic processes
entangle us in a web of paperwork
requirements that institutionalize
delay. States sometimes require owners
of a contaminated site to submit
engineering and geology reports with
core sampling and laboratory analysis
of contaminant concentrations before
cleanup can begin. This may take
weeks or months; meanwhile the leak
spreads.
One thing that makes an UST
cleanup somewhat easier than a
Superfund cleanup is that the
contaminant is usually a known
commodity. The product is usually
petroleum, which tends to float on
ground water and is easier to clean up
than many chemicals. Though
petroleum may be easier to find and
"pull up" than many chemicals, it isn't
always easy to dispose of. Some
cleanups can require three different
permits for treatment and discharge of
JULY/AUGUST 1991
51
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contaminants. Sometimes these
permits must be obtained from three
different agencies: one for discharge of
dirty water pumped up from a site;
one for the disposal of contaminated
soils—"dirty dirt"; and one for any
discharge to the air.
EPA believes that at many sites,
cleanups feasibly can be underway
within 72 hours of a leak report. Of
course, the state should be notified,
but state review should not be an
excuse to delay action.
"Start your contractor cleaning up
today," says Tom Schruben, EPA's
clean-up expert. "The question for the
states is 'How far should this cleanup
go?', not 'Is it OK to start?'" says
Schruben, who is working with states
to streamline their administrative
processes. "One-stop shopping" for all
needed permits is an idea being tested.
Concurrent review of items, rather
than drawing the process out one step
at a time, can save weeks. Another
timesaver is pre-approving selected
clean-up technologies so that no state
review is needed to get started.
States have a big incentive to
improve cleanups, not only for the
thousands of tank owners who find
themselves with leak problems, but
because under the UST Trust Fund,
states themselves are managing and
paying for many cleanups. The pot of
fund money is just not big enough to
handle the projected need, so "faster,
better, cheaper" means the states'
limited federal dollars will also go
further. Several states have developed
their own clean-up funds, usually
based (like the federal UST fund) on a
small petroleum or gasoline tax. State
agencies handling tank cleanups are
equally concerned that their funds be
used effectively.
In addition to administrative
improvements, EPA sees great hope for
innovative clean-up technologies and
has several initiatives to spur their
wider application. Among other
initiatives, the Office of Underground
Storage Tanks has cooperative
agreements with private firms that are
testing and marketing new techniques
to provide extra training and
equipment for state tank programs.
EPA favors fie I'd measurement
techniques that enable on-site
sampling and analysis of
contamination rather than sending
samples off to a lab, which is time
consuming and expensive. Because
petroleum volatizes, contaminants are
continually released to the air as
vapors. Therefore, laboratory analysis,
which can take days or weeks, may not
give as accurate results as those
obtained fresh in the field. One such
field technique is called vapor
surveying (see box). EPA offers a
hands-on course ("Soil Vapor Boot
Camp") to learn this method which
combines lecture, lab, and field work
for state clean-up staffs and their
contractors. The Agency is also
developing videos, computer programs,
and courses on improved clean-up
technologies, such as vacuum
extraction, that do a better job in less
time for less money.
Although there is much positive
movement, it is easy to be
overwhelmed by the sheer numbers at
stake—both dollars and numbers of
leaking tank sites. "We are very
concerned about the impact of
cleanups on businesses, consumers,
and society," says David Ziegele,
Acting Director of EPA's Office of
Underground Storage Tanks. "I am
delighted to see some states making
improvements in their administrative
process and using new approaches in
field clean-up work."
Additionally, says Ziegele, "States
are taking the lead in developing
alternative mechanisms to reduce the
impacts of cleanup and compliance
costs. For example, 43 states have
passed legislation authorizing funds to
help reduce the economic hardships of
compliance with financial
responsibility requirements and of
paying for cleanups. And 13 states
have assistance funds which help tank
owners comply with technical
standards."
Ultimately, Ziegele, is upbeat: "I see
all these related elements coming
together at a time when we most need
to improve the quality of cleanups, do
them quickly—and at significantly
reduced costs." Q
Sites like Kentucky's
Valley of the Drums
brought the
hazardous waste problem
to the nation's attention.
52
EPA JOURNAL
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A Forum:
Are We Conquering
Hazardous Waste?
Hazardous waste is currently being
regulated by preventive and remedial
programs under the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRAJ
and the Comprehensive Environmental
Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act, commonly known as Superfund. But
the real question is, Are we in fact
getting our hazardous waste disposal
problems under control? EPA Journal
posed this question to eight experienced
observers; their commentaries follow:
J. William Futrell
The United States is making solid
progress in bringing its hazardous
waste disposal problems under control.
After focusing during the 1970s on the
visible harm done by air and water
pollution, people woke up to the threat
to ground water posed by leaking
hazardous waste sites. Since 1980,
Americans have been playing catch-up
after decades of neglect.
Several major programs are gathering
momentum to get the job done. The
Superfund program deals largely with
abandoned waste sites and the problems
of the past. Superfund is really two
programs. The first, an emergency
response program, calls for rapid
government intervention to halt the
leakage and threat to ground water and
has been a great success in protecting the
public health. The second, a remedial
program aimed at restoring underground
aquifers to a high level of cleanliness, is
a very expensive long-range program that
takes years and even decades for each
site.
The RCRA and UST programs address
the waste problems of ongoing
operations. The costs of these programs
will rise during corning years and add to
the total cost of cleanup. Currently,
JULY/AUGUST 1991
53
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critics are having a field day
complaining about the expense of
clean-up programs. They forget how
carefully Congress considered the cost of
not controlling hazardous waste. Half the
country's drinking water comes from
ground-water sources. The only
economically feasible way to protect our
precious ground-water resource is to
prevent its contamination. Pumping and
treating after the fact entails astronomical
costs.
Blaming Superfund for America's
hazardous waste bills is a bum rap.
Hazardous waste management is
proceeding in a workmanlike manner for
such a large scale nationwide
construction program. The public is
getting its money's worth. Compare the
annual costs of the Superfund program
to the costs of other activities in the
public and private sector. In a recent
year, Superfund expenditures were
equivalent to the expense of a Forrestal
class aircraft carrier or, alternately, the
development and production of a new
model automobile in Detroit.
Effective waste management programs
require a long hau!, and they cost
money. But Congress has listened hard
and long on this topic and knows that
this is an area where the American
people want to go the course and are
willing to pay the price.
In the long run, the price of these
programs is going to decline because of
private sector responsiveness. Effective
waste management programs backed up
by strong enforcement are transforming
America's manufacturing practices.
Industry and regulators are turning to
pollution prevention and waste
minimization. This would never have
happened—and will not continue to
happen—without the effective hazardous
waste management programs so
laboriously achieved during the last
decade.
(FutrelJ is President of the Environmental
Law Institute.)
William Yancey Brown
Management of hazardous pollutants
in solid waste warrants a mixed
report card. Three priorities head my list
for progress:
• Foremost is to continue advances in
pollution prevention. This is a
well-recognized and often-discussed
need, and I will not address it further
here.
• A second priority is to establish a
federal regime for the unregulated
"orphan" wastes of the nation.
• A third priority is to resist following
the path of short-term political
expediency leading to restrictions on
interstate shipments of waste.
According to EPA statistics, about 11
and a half billion tons of solid waste are
generated each year in the United States
(not counting another billion and a half
tons of agricultural wastes). Translated
into individual terms, this amounts to
something more than 300 pounds of
solid waste per day per person. This
300-pound total per person sorts out
roughly as follows: assorted industrial
wastes, 190 pounds; oil and gas wastes,
71 pounds; mining wastes, 35 pounds;
formally designated "hazardous waste," 7
pounds; and municipal waste, otherwise
known as trash, 4 pounds.
Formally defined "hazardous waste" is
closely regulated under RCRA. Also, EPA
has proposed a detailed regime for
municipal waste, or trash, under RCRA
which—I hope and presume—will be
made final soon. However, these
categories of waste make up a very small
percentage of the total solid waste
generated in this country.
Most of our solid waste is not
currently being regulated under RCRA
and is being disposed of without federal
oversight: This includes so-called
"nonhazardous" industrial waste, and
mining, oil, and gas wastes. Although
these waste streams are highly variable
and diverse, many contain hazardous
metals and organic chemicals.
The scope of these unregulated wastes
is enormous. Industrial wastes, for
example, are discharged into 15,000
What is "Hazardous Waste?"
The RCRA Definition
To Be a Hazardous Waste, a Waste
Must Be a "Solid Waste" ...
. . . defined in RCRA as "garbage,
refuse, or sludge or any other waste
material." According to RCRA, a solid
waste can be a solid, a semi-solid, a
liquid, or a contained gas.
... And It Must Meet These
Criteria:
"Because of its quantity,
concentration, or physical, chemical,
or infectious characteristics, [it] may
cause, or significantly contribute to,
an increase in mortality or an
increase in serious irreversible, or
incapacitating reversible, illness; or
pose a substantial present or
potential hazard to human health
and the environment when
improperly treated, stored,
transported, or disposed of, or
otherwise managed."
Not Included in RCRA Hazardous
Waste Regulations Are .. .
• Domestic sewage
• Irrigation waters or industrial
discharges permitted under the
Federal Water Pollution Control Act
• Certain nuclear material as
defined by the Atomic Energy Act
• Household wastes, including toxic
and hazardous waste
• Certain mining and petroleum
industry wastes
• Agricultural wastes, excluding
some pesticides
• Small quantity wastes (that is,
wastes from businesses generating
fewer than 220 pounds of hazardous
waste per month).
54
EPA JOURNAL
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waste ponds, 5,000 waste piles, 3,000
landfills, and 4,000 land application
units of other kinds. Oil and gas wastes
are sent to some 126,000 waste ponds.
Collectively, these wastes go through the
biggest hole in RCRA. RCRA is now
being reviewed for reauthorization, and
it is time to close the gap.
In the meantime, restrictions on
interstate shipments of waste are being
proposed from some quarters. Such
restrictions are bad for the environment
and for the economy. Each year, about 15
million tons of trash from 38 states move
across a state political boundary before
disposal. Communities must accept
responsibility for managing their wastes,
and shipments clear across the country
should not be condoned. However, most
interstate transport is the every-day,
routine movement of trash from cities
and rural counties located near state
lines. The short-term effect of restricting
interstate waste shipments would be
purposeless disruption of this system.
More fundamentally, the long-term
environmentally correct place for a
landfill, a trash-to-energy plant, or any
waste management facility has nothing to
do with state political boundaries and
everything to do with hydrogeology and
other features of the site. Furthermore,
the environment and taxpayers benefit
from economies of scale found at larger
facilities serving regional population
centers. The environment benefits
because of the better design and
operation and the stronger inspection
efforts that characterize larger facilities.
As for cost, EPA estimates the full cost
per ton of trash disposed of at a
25-ton-per-day landfill is more than three
times the cost of disposal at a
1,500-ton-per-day landfill.
The reasons for supporting continued
interstate shipments to large, regional
municipal waste management facilities
apply with even more force for
hazardous wastes. Good location is even
more critical, economies of scale are
essential, and existing facilities are much
fewer. Restriction of interstate shipments
not only would harm the industries
generating waste; it also could halt or
retard the cleanup of Superfund sites
and stand as an obstacle to
accomplishing the mission of Superfund.
Government should stand against such
restrictions on interstate shipments, just
as it should intervene and bring the
"orphan wastes" into its regulatory net.
(Dr. Brown is Director of Environmental
Affairs for Waste Management, Inc., and
Chairman of the company's Executive
Environmental Committee.)
Senator John H. Chafee
After more than two decades and
millions of dollars spent on
clean-up measures, Love Canal still
conjures disturbing images of a ghost
town deserted by its inhabitants because
of uncontrolled and unsafe handling of
hazardous wastes.
In an effort to prevent incidents like
Love Canal, Congress enacted RCRA in
1976, then amended and strengthened it
significantly in 1984. As the federal
statute primarily responsible for
preventing the mishandling of hazardous
waste, RCRA has undeniably
revolutionized the way hazardous wastes
are managed.
For hazardous waste that is so
designated under the law, RCRA
mandates a "cradle to grave" tracking
system which follows wastes from their
point of generation to ultimate disposal
in order to assure their safe management.
This tracking system—in combination
with design and operation standards for
waste facilities and restrictions on the
types of wastes that can be disposed of
on land—has brought results: the
development of secure hazardous waste
treatment and disposal facilities and the
closure of over 1,100 substandard
facilities.
Clearly, RCRA has significantly helped
us gain control over our hazardous waste
disposal problems. The once common,
indiscriminate dumping of hazardous
waste that produced sites like Love
Canal is a thing of the past—an illegal
and almost unimaginable practice today.
However, gaps remain in RCRA's
regulatory scheme.
Perhaps the most glaring gap is the
law's failure to provide EPA with clear
authority to regulate certain kinds of
recycling activities. Although RCRA
regulates the transfer, storage, treatment,
and disposal of "hazardous waste" (see
box on page 54), critics have pointed out
that the law does not regulate certain
recycling processes that use hazardous
materials which are either excluded from
the statutory definitions of solid and
hazardous waste or not otherwise
covered under the law.
Unfortunately, some recycling
operations can, and often do, present the
same risks that are posed by hazardous
waste treatment or disposal operations.
In fact, literally dozens of former
recycling operations have been placed on
the National Priorities List of highly
contaminated sites slated for cleanup
under Superfund. Let's not forget the
hard-learned lessons of Love Canal and
our past mismanagement of hazardous
waste: These recycling operations need
to be regulated where there is potential
for environmental contamination.
Another gap in the current law is its
failure to assure adequate regulation of
so-called "nonhazardous" industrial
waste. Of the 11-plus billion pounds of
solid waste generated in the United
States each year, about 7.5 billion tons
consist of industrial waste (as compared,
for example, to roughly 200 million tons
of municipal trash and 300 million tons
of "hazardous" waste).
Much of this huge industrial waste
stream consists of truly nonhazardous
material such as construction or
demolition rubble; however, it does
include small amounts of hazardous
wastes that either are exempt from RCRA
regulations or are currently being
considered by EPA for hazardous waste
regulation under RCRA.
Under RCRA, the regulation of
facilities that handle only
"nonhazardous" waste is left to the
states. Some states have done a good job
of regulating industrial wastes; others
have not. An April 1990 report by the
Government Accounting Office
(Nonhazardous Waste: Environmental
Safeguards for Industrie] Facilities Need
to be Developed) found that the lack of
meaningful regulation of some so-called
nonhazardous industrial waste has
already resulted in ground-water
contamination in several states.
Given the volume and the potential
threat posed by some of these wastes, it
is apparent that Congress needs to set
minimum standards so that industrial
wastes will be managed safely. With
passage of legislation that has already
been introduced to address these gaps,
we can continue the outstanding
progress already made in controlling our
hazardous waste disposal problems.
(Chafee (R-Rhode Island) is ranking
minority member on (he Senate Committee
for Environment and Public Works.)
JULY/AUGUST 1991
55
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Linda E. Greer
In 1978, the problem of hazardous
waste could be characterized with a
single site: Love Canal, a notorious
situation in upstate New York which
occupied the nation's headlines for
weeks when leaking wastes were
discovered and the neighborhood was
evacuated to ensure safety. By 1980, with
the passage of Superfund, the nation
envisioned hazardous waste as a $1.5
billion problem, requiring no more than
five years to put behind us. Problem sites
were considered strictly a function of
past activities, and Congress thought that
a finite clean-up program would take
care of them.
By 1984, ongoing management of
hazardous waste was a recognized
environmental problem; licensed leaking
landfills were the focus of the
reauthorization of RCRA, the law
governing the treatment and disposal of
hazardous waste as it is generated.
Today, a little over a decade later,
expenditures for hazardous waste
cleanup dwarf all other environmental
expenditures annually, and new sites are
discovered more rapidly than others are
cleaned up. Thus the question can be
fairly asked, Is this nation getting its
hazardous waste disposal problems
under control?
Predictably, the answer is no. But the
real problem lies not in the areas most
commonly cited: the slow pace of
hazardous waste site investigation and
cleanup, the inadequate application of
permanent clean-up technologies, the
slow pace of RCRA hazardous waste
facility permitting, etc. Whore we fail to
address these problems, we fail only in
our attempt to cure an already
established disease. Much more
disturbing is the dearth of sustained
effort to prevent disease—that is, to
prevent the creation of future
contaminated sites in need of cleanup.
There are two major gaps in the
nation's hazardous-waste pollution
prevention efforts to date. First, the
definition of hazardous waste is woefully
inadequate, and thus a large universe of
toxic materials are disposed of in the
environment outside of public view and
without government safeguards. RCRA
regulations cover only a small number of
industries and a limited number of
chemical wastes. For example, EPA has
been sued by the environmental
community for its failure to list waste
streams from 12 industries identified as
candidates for regulation by Congress in
1984, and these unregulated industries
are likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Through several important shortcomings
in the RCRA program, this country is
failing to regulate up front those
materials it knows to be hazardous and
knows to be causing contamination.
The other important gap in our
pollution prevention effort is the minor
attention given to source reduction,
minimizing the generation of waste. The
nation's hazardous waste policies must
shift their major emphasis to reducing
the generation of waste in the first place
by phasing out the use of particular
chemicals and making industrial
operations as "chemically tight" as
possible, rather than by treating at the
"end of the pipe" wastes which result
from inefficient operations. Only then
will the problems resulting even from
proper management of hazardous waste
be behind us. To date, efforts at source
reduction have consisted of little more
than EPA requests to industry to
voluntarily reduce the waste it generates
and report back to EPA and the public.
The lack of focus on pollution
prevention would be disturbing even if
rapid cleanup of existing problem sites
were well underway. But the backdrop of
severe technical and administrative
problems in this clean-up program makes
our inattention to prevention utter folly.
The only real solution for the nation's
waste disposal problems is a sharp
reduction in the generation of waste that
can harm humans and the environment.
Only in this way will we get our
hazardous waste disposal problems
under control.
(Dr. Greer is a Senior Scientist with the
Natural Resources Defense Council in
Washington, DC.)
Bruce W. Karrh
The framework is in place for getting
our hazardous waste problems under
control, but important issues of cost,
equity, and priority-setting remain. In
reality, there are three distinct but
related hazardous waste disposal
problems—and given limited resources,
the solution to any one affects our ability
to address the others.
The first and most visible is
Superfund: cleaning up orphan disposal
sites. Du Pont was among the original
backers of Superfund. However, many of
the reservations expressed by its critics
turn out to have been well founded.
Superfund is litigious. Progress in
actual remediation is painfully slow,
though $11.2 billion has been spent or
committed thus far. Estimates of
transaction costs for some cleanups range
from one-third to one-half for legal fees,
multiple engineering studies,
record-keeping, and other administrative
costs. Both EPA and Congress are
investigating Superfund expenditures.
Recently, the New York Times
summed up the Superfund experience:
"Long delays, regiments of lawyers,
blizzards of documents, a widespread
sense of being unfairly singled out to
shoulder others' responsibilities—this is
life in the clutches of [Superfund]. And
that's when things are going smoothly
What can be done? In my judgment,
the problem is summed up in the title of
the Superfund law: the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation,
and Liability Act. The Act tries to do too
many things. The solution is to focus on
the speedy, economical cleanup of
genuine health hazards. This will require
more reasonable standards of "clean,"
and it may mean more ready
commitment of dollars from Superfund.
Someone, somewhere, may get away
with something (it won't be Du Pont),
but we will all benefit by putting this
problem behind us at far less cost than
the present approach.
The second problem is the cleanup of
hazardous waste sites that are owned by
56
EPA JOURNAL
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identifiable, viable companies, such as
Du Pont. RCRA ensures that cleanup will
be done, but at costs to these companies
estimated to range up to hundreds of
billions of dollars.
With RCRA as with Superfund, there
is the opportunity to achieve reasonable
standards uf "clean" at significantly less
cost than the most stringent
standards—and therefore to invest more
of our environmental resources in
reducing current and future emissions.
This brings me to the third and, in my
judgment, most important waste disposal
problem. What should be done on a
forward-looking basis?
The EPA's answer is pollution
prevention, and we agree. If hazardous
waste is not generated, it doesn't have to
be disposed of. For the long term, our
objective should be waste-free processes.
This will require industry to rethink its
practices and retool its plants. The
changes will be expensive and will take
time. In the interim, there must be
provision for hazardous waste disposal.
Industry needs the assurance of adequate
disposal capacity and the option to cross
state lines to handle hazardous wastes in
the most technically sound and efficient
way.
Increasingly, industry is acting
voluntarily to anticipate public
expectations, do the right thing, and stay
ahead of environmental compliance. Du
Pont, for example, has voluntary
programs to reduce waste and emissions,
These voluntary actions need to be
credited by federal and state
environmental agencies, and they need
to be encouraged by market mechanisms.
To the extent that this happens, we will
be able to address the issues remaining
in hazardous waste disposal and get on
with the job of environmental protection.
(Karrh is Vice President /or Safety,
Health, and Environmental Affairs for the
Du Pont Company.)
Representative Allan B. Swift
Under Subtitle C of RCRA, the United
States has one of the best—if not
the best—hazardous waste management
systems in the world. Until now,
however, RCRA has concentrated
primarily on the end of the "cradle to
grave" continuum—treatment and
disposal. During the RCRA
reauthorization process in the 102nd
Congress, it is our challenge to focus less
on disposal and more on not creating the
waste in the first place through waste
minimization and recycling.
Perhaps the most important question a
member of the industrial community
must ask when it comes to RCRA is,
"Am I regulated or not?" And the answer
to that question is dependent on the
answer to another—"When is a waste not
a waste?"
Attempting to solve that riddle is not
just an exercise in semantics or
meaningless legalese; the answer can
have enormous legal and financial
implications under our hazardous waste
regulatory system.
EPA attempted to solve the riddle in
January, 1985, when it promulgated the
current regulatory definition of solid
waste. That "definition" is in reality an
elaborate scheme that attempts to define
which materials, when handled in
certain ways, are wastes and which are
commodities or products and thus not
subject to RCRA regulation. Stated
another way, the definition attempts to
identify which recycling practices are
really waste management, and should be
regulated as such, and which recycling
practices are so inextricably linked with
the manufacturing process that they
should not be subject to RCRA.
This confusing situation serves neither
environmental nor business interests.
The main problems, as I see them, are:
how to distinguish between legitimate
and sham recycling; and how to
encourage legitimate recycling while at
the same time ensuring the protection of
human health and the environment.
"Sham recycling" is the situation in
which a person claims he is not treating
or disposing of hazardous waste, but
JULY/AUGUST 1991
instead is recycling secondary materials
into a legitimate product in an attempt to
avoid RCRA regulation. Without the
protections afforded by RCRA, sham
recycling operations can do significant
environmental damage.
But it is also important to remember
that even legitimate recycling is not
necessarily benign. Some major
environmental problems have been
caused by recycling operations that
produce truly useful and legitimate
products, such as metals recovery.
Evidence of this is the significant
number of recycling sites on the
Superfund National Priorities List. For
this reason, many argue that even
legitimate recycling activities need more
regulation under Subtitle C, not less.
The key will be to strike the
appropriate balance. A confusing
regulatory scheme, or an overly
burdensome one, may have
environmentally counterproductive
consequences if it serves to discourage
legitimate recycling operations.
For example, if a manufacturer would
like to recycle some of his waste stream
into a useful product, but he isn't sure
whether that recycling process would be
a RCRA-regulated activity requiring a
permit, he would probably be unwilling
to invest in the recycling process only to
find himself later in violation of the law.
On the other hand, a manufacturer
who would like to recycle some of his
waste stream but who is reasonably
certain that that particular recycling
process would be a RCRA-regulated
activity, may choose to continue
disposing of that waste rather than
recycling it because he is unwilling to
invest the significant time and money
necessary to obtain a RCRA Part B
permit for the management of hazardous
wastes.
Our challenge is twofold. We must
clarify RCRA to eliminate the sham
recycling loophole and to distinguish
between recycling processes which are
regulated under Subtitle C and those
which are not. For those recycling
processes which are determined to be
appropriately regulated under Subtitle C,
we should examine ways to remove
procedural and permitting barriers that
act as disincentives to legitimate
recycling, while we simultaneously
ensure protection of human health and
the environment.
How we encourage recycling and take
advantage of its potential for waste
minimization will be one of the most
important public policy issues to be
decided during the RCRA reauthorization
process, and its impact will be felt for a
long time to come.
(Swi/t (D-Washington) chairs the
Transportation and Hazardous Materials
Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy
and Commerce.)
57
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James M. Strock
The efforts of California—and our
nation as a whole—to gain the upper
hand on the hazardous waste leviathan
are hampered by one recalcitrant
non-complier.
This toxic waste producer has acceded
to clean-up and compliance agreements
for 17 federal Superfund sites with the
State of California. Yet our state remains
concerned that we may face other
hazardous waste violations in the future.
The reason: sovereign immunity.
These hazardous waste sites are U.S.
military installations. They are among
141 Department of Defense sites with
more than 2,000 suspected or confirmed
areas of contamination in our state.
When the federal government asserts
sovereign immunity, Californians have
no assurance that these sites, or more
than 2,000 other areas of confirmed or
suspected contamination, will fully meet
our stringent environmental standards.
The problem is compounded by plans to
shut down six military bases by 1995
and proposals to close more than a
dozen other facilities in California.
Meanwhile, clean-up schedules at
military bases stretch beyond 2010—and
earlier deadlines already have been
broken or revised.
Governor Pete Wilson supports
legislation—now pending in
Congress—that would remove, once and
for all, the cloak of sovereign immunity
for the federal government's own
hazardous waste violations. If the
environmental law is good enough for
the private sector, surely it is good
enough for the federal government.
The need is critical, given plans to
develop military base sites into
residential and commercial
developments, recreation areas, and
other community projects. Our economic
and environmental goals are intertwined.
Sovereign immunity must not become a
legal thicket into which federal officials
can retreat to avoid safe uses of existing
facilities and rapid cleanup of those that
will close.
If the United States is to gain control
of its hazardous waste problem,
environmental enforcement must be
applied without fear or favor. If
California and other states are to protect
the health and safety of their citizens, we
must insist that the federal government
live within our laws.
(Strock is Secretary for Environmental
Protection for the State of California. From
1989 to 1991 he was EPA's Assistant
Administrator for Enforcement.)
Milton Russell
The roller coaster phase of hazardous
waste remediation is leveling off.
During the 1970s and 1980s, each slow
ascent as the country gained a measure
of control over one hazardous waste
problem was followed by a
stomach-churning plummet as another
problem took its place.
On a real roller coaster, the fear is
acceptable because of confidence that all
will come out all right if you just hang
on. That same confidence is beginning to
permeate reactions to the hazardous
waste problem. In that sense, we are
gaining control.
Control doesn't mean that the
problems are behind us. Indeed, in the
expensive, tough, slogging work of
actually remediating sites, the effort is in
the beginning stages. Confidence comes
because the systems are largely in place
to accomplish this work, and the
dimensions of the work are becoming
clearer. Further, the urgency of the task
has diminished because immediate risks
to health and the environment are now
seen to be less than originally feared.
In the early days, the hazardous waste
problem was thought to be limited to
relatively few large sites and the
clean-up task to be straightforward. A
now laughably small Superfund program
was passed in 1980 with the expectation
that in five years most of the work would
be done. Then came corrective action
under the RCRA requirements for
hazardous waste releases, the regulation
of underground storage tanks, the
problems at federal facilities, the
regulatory gaps remaining to be filled by
state and private action—and recognition
that the Superfund task itself had been
grossly underestimated.
No wonder that to the riders the roller
coaster seemed out of control! The
original watchword was "do," and that
proved impossible in the time projected.
The catch phrase switched to "try
harder," but even with trying harder, the
goal of leaving to future generations an
environment that was acceptably safe
seemed always to recede.
Now, however, one by one the systems
for remediation have come into place
and the work is underway. Moreover,
realization is growing that the country
can declare success if the task is
complete by, say, 2020 as Jong as any
direct threats to health and the
environment are promptly eliminated. A
marathon is involved, not a 100-yard
dash, so the guideline now can be "try
smarter."
The magnitude of the task and the
time available to do it make trying
smarter both crucial and possible. A
study underway at the University of
Tennessee and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory is estimating the total
expenditures required under current
policy and using existing technology.
Final results will not be available until
fall 1991, but it is already evident that
annual costs, evenly spread over 30
years, will rival those spent for clean
air—and that is just to clean up the
legacy of wastes we inherited. Further
investment in cheaper and more effective
technology is clearly called for. It is also
possible that policy and practice changes
can be devised that will lower costs
while still meeting environmental goals.
The end of the ride remains far down
track. There are dips and turns ahead
and lots of holding on yet to do. But the
car now is getting under control. We may
not enjoy the rest of the ride, but at least
we can approach it with a level of
confidence unmatched in the fearsome
time that has passed, n
fDr. Russell is a Collaborating Scientist at
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and The
University of Tennessee, Knoxviiie, where
he is also a Professor of Economics and
Senior Fellow in the Waste Management
Remediation and Education Institute. From
1983 to 1987 he was EPA Assistant
Administrator of the Office of Policy
Planning and Evaluation.)
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EPA JOURNAL
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Greening America
with Greenways
A Book Review by David Burwell
Stand aside, Trump Plaza. The
social centerpiece of the
community of the future will not be a
glitzy hotel, gambling joint, shopping
mall, theme park, or any other
monument to conspicuous
consumption. It will be the greenway.
In the 1600s, American communities
were built around the town commons,
which served as both pasture and
meeting place. Over the next two
centuries, other structures became the
central pivots for organizing new
American communities—churches,
courthouses, schools, libraries, railroad
stations, docks. It is a sad commentary
on our times that so many
communities in the late 20th century
are built around theme parks and
shopping malls. Mammon seems to
have triumphed.
Enter the greenway. Part parkway,
part greenbelt, part garden, the
greenway is a relatively new term for
an old idea: the linear park. Organizing
communities around greenways was
first championed by Frederick Law
Olmsted, the father of landscape
architecture and designer of Central
Park in Manhattan, of Prospect Park in
Brooklyn, and of the "emerald
necklace," known as the Fenway,
around Boston. The greenway is the
new town commons. It is a ray of hope
in our pell-mell run toward
wall-to-wall commercialization.
The rise of the modern greenway
movement is chronicled, championed,
nurtured, and analyzed in Greenways
for America, a new book by Charles E.
Little, editor of American Land
Classics and a life-long lover of the
land. Mr. Little has done his
homework, tracing the origins of the
greenway idea to the English country
garden and demonstrating how it
JULY/AUGUST 1991
59
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adapted to the rough, uncut American
landscape.
While Olmsted is clearly the
towering figure in Little's story,
leaders of the broader conservation
movement are intertwined throughout
the saga. Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall,
and Benton MacKaye all play
significant roles, as do Lewis
Mumford, Ian McHarg, and the
urbanologist William H. Whyte.
Environmental scholars should read
this book for a deeper understanding
of the conservation movement;
landscape architects, for a deeper
understanding of their profession; the
rest of us, for inspiration.
Greenways for America, published
by the Johns Hopkins University Press,
is more than a history lesson; it is a
chronicle of hope in the otherwise
barren landscape of American land
conservation. One does not need to be
a New Age proponent of the Gaia
Hypothesis to appreciate the ongoing
threats to the biological systems on
which life depends and to the human
communities that required centuries to
build. Little does not dwell on
ecological Armaggedon. Instead, he
looks for ways out. More and more, he
sees greenways as avenues of escape.
Little's text, accompanied by 24
pages of photography, explains how
various greenway projects got started,
how obstacles inevitably appeared, and
how a little bit of courage and a lot of
hard work carried the day. Some of the
best projects are Olmsted dreams still
struggling to become reality. These
undertakings are arduous. They're not
for couch potatoes.
Little divides greenways into five
categories: urban rivers; paths and
trails; ecological corridors; scenic
byways; and networks. In other words,
they connect. In the work of ecological
planner Ian McHarg and landscape
architect Philip Lewis, they also find a
logical, even scientific, underpinning
in the uncanny tendency of significant
landscape features to cluster along
"environmental corridors," as Lewis
describes them.
There's the rub. Greenways are
much more than full employment
projects for landscape architects. They
are the organizing principle for
biological and human communities
that work. They can be local, regional,
or even national in scope.
Little points out that the
Appalachian Trail as we know it is a
mere shadow of its original silhouette
in the fertile mind of Benton MacKaye,
who envisioned not merely a trail but
a wide swath of green all along the
Eastern Seaboard with rivulets and
eddies extending in all directions to
provide a "dam and levee " system
controlling future migration and
settlement patterns. The effects of the
Depression and a national highway
program that subsidized development
destroyed his vision. Now, with land
prices easily 20 times what they were
when MacKaye proposed his
Appalachian Greenway, the
opportunity appears gone forever.
Greenways /or America is part of a
recent revival of the old land ethic.
Little introduces us to the local leaders
of this new drive to conserve land.
Some are dreamers; others are social
reformers. Still others are planners and
professionals. Conservationists rub
shoulders with outdoor enthusiasts.
Together, they are the people moved
by what Tony Hiss, in The Experience
of Place, describes as "simultaneous
perception"—that is, the need to
create visual landscapes that make
sense, that connect and beautify rather
than fragment and scatter. More and
more people, apparently, are feeling
alienated from their physical
environment, disoriented, and alone.
The greenway movement is an attempt
to fight back, to reconnect with their
surroundings.
Similarly, in their recent books,
social philosopher Richard Sennett
and sociologist Ray Oldenburg have
described this alienation as the loss of
" the great, good place," the American
equivalent of the sidewalk cafes of
Paris or the neighborhood pubs of
London, where people routinely meet
informally and gain an understanding
of themselves as functioning members
of larger human communities. Whether
the linkages are physical or social,
greenways help build connections in a
fragmented world. "To make a
greenway," Little observes, "is to make
a community." In essence, Greenways
for America is a brief for hope, a
(BurwelJ, a lawyer, is president of the
Rails-to-TraiJs Conservancy, which works
at the national and grassroots levels to
convert abandoned roilbeds into linear
parks for bicycling, jogging, strolling,
horseback riding, and other pursuits.)
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Life on the Rocks...
from Annie Dillard
The ice rolled up, the ice rolled
back, and 1 knelt on a plain of lava
boulders in the islands called
Galapagos, stroking a giant tortoise's
neck. The tortoise closed its eyes and
stretched its neck to its greatest height
and vulnerability. I rubbed that neck
and when I pulled away my hand, my
palm was green with a slick of
single-celled algae. I stared at the
algae, and at the tortoise, the way you
stare at any life on a lava flow, and
thought: Well—here we all are ....
It is worth flying to Guayaquil,
Ecuador, and then to Baltra in the
Galapagos just to see the rocks. But
these rocks are animal gardens. They
are home to a Hieronymus Bosch
assortment of windblown, stowaway,
castaway, flotsam and shipwrecked
creatures. Most exist nowhere else on
earth. These reptiles and insects, small
mammals and birds, evolved
unmolested on the various islands on
which they were cast into unique
species adapted to the
boulder-wrecked shores, the cactus
deserts of the lowlands, or the elevated
jungles of the large islands' interiors.
You come for the animals. You come
to see the curious shapes soft proteins
can take, to impress yourself with their
reality, and to greet them ....
There is always some creature going
about its beautiful business ....
The animals are tame. They have not
been persecuted, and show no fear of
man. You pass among them as though
you were wind, spindrift, sunlight,
leaves. The songbirds are tame. On
Hood Island I sat beside a nesting
waved albatross while a mockingbird
scratched in my hair, another
mockingbird jabbed at my fingernail,
and a third mockingbird made an
exquisite progression of pokes at my
bare feet up the long series of eyelets
in my basketball shoes....
The wild hawk is tame. The
Galapagos hawk is related to North
America's Swainson's hawk; I have
read that if you take pains, you can
walk up and pat it. I never tried. We
people don't walk up and pat each
other; enough is enough. The animals'
critical distance and mine tended to
coincide, so we could enjoy an easy
sociability without threat of violence
or unwonted intimacy. The hawk,
which is not notably sociable,
nevertheless endures even a
blundering approach, and is
apparently as content to perch on a
scrub tree at your shoulder as anyplace
else.
In the Galapagos, even the flies are
tame. Although most of the land is
Ecuadorian national park, and as such
rigidly protected, I confess I gave the
evolutionary ball an offsides shove by
dispatching every fly that bit me,
marveling the while at its pristine
ignorance, its blithe failure to register a
flight trigger at the sweep of my
descending hand—an insouciance that
was almost, but not quite,
disarming ....
We are strangers and sojourners, soft
dots on the rocks. You have walked
along the strand and seen where birds
have landed, walked, and flown; their
tracks begin in sand, and go, and
suddenly end. Our tracks do that: but
we go down. And stay down. While
we're here, during the seasons our
JULY/AUGUST 1991
61
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tents are pitched in the light, we pass
among each other crying "greetings" in
a thousand tongues, and "welcome,"
and "good-bye." Inhabitants of
uncrowded colonies tend to offer the
stranger famously warm
hospitality—and such are the
Galapagos sea lions. Theirs is the
greeting the first creatures must have
given Adam—a hero's welcome, a
universal and undeserved huzzah. Go,
and be greeted by sea lions.
I was sitting with ship's naturalist
Soames Summerhays on a sand beach
under cliffs on uninhabited Hood
Island. The white beach was a havoc
of lava boulders black as clinkers,
sleek with spray, and lambent as brass
in the sinking sun. To our left a dozen
sea lions were bodysurfing in the long
green combers that rose, translucent,
half a mile offshore. When the combers
broke, the shoreline boulders rolled. 1
could feel the roar in the rough rock
on which I sat; I could hear the grate
inside each long backsweeping sea, the
rumble of a rolled million rocks
muffled in splashes and the seethe
before the next wave's heave.
To our right, a sea lion slipped from
the ocean. It was a young bull; in
another few years he would be
dangerous, bellowing at intruders and
biting off great dirty chunks of the
ones he caught. Now this young bull,
which weighed maybe 120 pounds,
sprawled silhouetted in the late light,
slick as a drop of quicksilver, his
glistening whiskers radii of gold like
any crown. He hauled his packed hulk
toward us up the long beach; he flung
himself with an enormous surge of
fur-clad muscle onto the boulder
where I sat. "Soames," I said—very
quietly, "he's here because we're here,
isn't he?" The naturalist nodded. I felt
water drip on my elbow behind me,
then the fragile scrape of whiskers, and
finally the wet warmth and weight of a
muzzle, as the creature settled to sleep
on my arm. I was catching on to sea
lions.
Walk into the water. Instantly sea
lions surround you, even if none has
been in sight. To say that they come to
play with you is not especially
anthropomorphic. Animals play. The
bull sea lions are off patrolling their
territorial shores; these are the cows
and young, which range freely. A
five-foot sea lion peers intently into
your face, then urges her muzzle
gently against your underwater mask
and searches your eyes without
blinking. Next she rolls upside down
and slides along the length of your
floating body, rolls again, and casts a
long glance back at your eyes. You are,
I believe, supposed to follow, and
think up something clever in return.
You can play games with sea lions in
the water using shells or bits of leaf, if
you are willing. You can spin on your
vertical axis and a sea lion will swim
circles around you, keeping her face
always six inches from yours, as
though she were tethered. You can
make a game of touching their back
flippers, say, and the sea lions will
understand at once; somersaulting
conveniently before your clumsy
hands, they will give you an excellent
field of back flippers.
And when you leave the water, they
follow. They don't want you to go.
They porpoise to the shore, popping
their heads up when they lose you and
casting'about, then speeding to your
side and emitting a choked series of
vocal notes. If you won't relent, they
disappear, backing; but if you sit on
the beach with so much as a foot in
the water, two or three will station
with you, floating on their backs and
saying, Urr ....
Charles Darwin came to the
Galapagos in 1835, on the Beagle; he
was twenty-six. He threw the marine
iguanas as far as he could into the
water; he rode the tortoises and
sampled their meat. He noticed that
the tortoises' carapaces varied wildly
from island to island; so also did the
forms of various mockingbirds. He
made collections. Nine years later he
wrote in a letter, "I am almost
convinced (quite contrary to the
opinion I started with) that species are
not (it is like confessing a murder)
immutable." In 1859 he published On
the Origin of Species, and in 1871 The
Descent of Man.
[Before Darwin] we were all
crouched in a small room against the
comforting back wall, awaiting the
millennium which had been gathering
impetus since Adam and Eve. Up there
was a universe, and down here would
be a small strip of man come and gone,
created, taught, redeemed, and
gathered up in a bright twinkling, like
a sprinkling of confetti torn from
colored papers, tossed from windows,
and swept from the streets by morning.
The Darwinian revolution knocked
out the back wall, revealing eerie
lighted landscapes as far back as we
can see. Almost at once, Albert
Einstein and astronomers with
reflector telescopes and radio
telescopes knocked out the other walls
and the ceiling, leaving us sunlit,
exposed, and drifting—leaving us
puckers, albeit evolving puckers, on
the inbound curve of space-time ....
The mountains are no more fixed
than the stars. Granite, for example,
contains much oxygen and is relatively
light. It "floats." When granite forms
under the Earth's crust, great chunks of
it bob up, I read somewhere, like
dumplings. The continents themselves
are beautiful pea-green boats. The
Galapagos archipelago as a whole is
surfing toward Ecuador; South
America is sliding toward the
Galapagos; North America, too, is
sailing westward. We're on floating
islands, shaky ground ....
The old ark's a moverin'. Each live
thing wags its home waters, rumples
the turf, rearranges the air .... Like
boys on dolphins, the continents ride
their crustal plates. New lands
shoulder up from the waves, and old
lands buckle under. The very
landscapes heave; change burgeons
into change. Gray granite bobs up, red
clay compresses; yellow sandstone
tilts, surging in forests, incised by
streams. The mountains tremble, the
ice rasps back and forth, and the
protoplasm furls in shock waves, up
the rock valleys and down, ramifying
possibilities, riddling the mountains.
The planet spins, rapt inside its
intricate mists. The galaxy is a flung
thing, loose in the night, and our solar
system is one of many dotted
campfires ringed with tossed rocks.
What shall we sing, while the fire
burns down? We can sing only
specifics, time's rambling tune, the
places we have seen, the faces we have
known. I will sing you the Galapagos
islands, the sea lions soft on the rocks.
It's all still happening there, in real
light, the cool currents upwelling, the
finches falling on the wind ....
—From "Life on (he Rocks: (he Gaidpagos,"
in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions
and Encounters by Annie DiJJard.
Copyright 1982 by Annie Dillard.
Reprinted by permission of Harper &• Row,
Publishers, Inc.
62
EPA JOURNAL
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Guimond
Two new Deputy Assistant
Administrators have been
appointed in the Office of Solid
Waste and Emergency Response:
Richard J. Guimond and Charles
Bowdoin (Bowdy) Train.
Guimond has served in a
variety of different capacities
since he joined EPA when it was
created in 1971. From 1971 to
1978 and 1982 to 1990,
Guimond worked in the Office of
Radiation Programs, where he
ultimately became Office
Director in 1988. Guimond began
his EPA career as a nuclear
engineer in the Technology
Assessment Division and then
became a staff engineer and
technical assistant to the Deputy
Assistant Administrator for
Radiation Programs. Guimond
also served in the Criteria and
Standards Division, where he
was an assistant to the Director
for Special Projects, an
environmental project leader,
and finally director from 1982 to
1986. In 1986, he was appointed
Director of the Radon Division, a
post which he held until 1988.
Guimond also worked in the
Office of Toxic Substances from
1978 to 1982, serving as Chief
Engineer to the Deputy Assistant
Administrator, Chief of the
Special Regulation Branch,
Acting Deputy Director, ami
Chief of the Chemical Control
Branch—all within the Chemical
Control Division.
Guimond, a Commissioned
Officer with the U.S. Public
Health Service since 1970, was
appointed in 1989 as an
Assistant Surgeon General. With
the rank of Rear Admiral, he is
the most senior U.S. Public
Health Service official in EPA.
Guimond is a 1969 graduate of
the University of Notre Dame
and earned a Master of
Engineering degree from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
in 1970 and a Master of Science
degree in Environmental Health
from Harvard University in 1973.
He is the recipient of nearly a
do/en EPA awards and honors,
JULY/AUGUST 1991
Train Esty
including several meritorious
and superior service awards.
Train comes to EPA from the
law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts,
and Trowbridge in Washington,
DC, where he has been an
Associate Attorney since 1982. A
corporate lawyer, he has
concentrated on financial
transactions, restructuring
troubled investments, and
general counsel representation
for a wide spectrum of business
interests.
During college. Train worked
at the World Bank where he
helped evaluate the
environmental impacts of
development projects funded by
the bank. He also spent a short
time in the office of Senator
Charles McC. Mathias working
on a variety of matters, including
environmental issues.
Train received his B.A. degree
from Trinity College in 1977,
majoring in economics and
environmental studies. He went
on to earn his J.D. in 1982 from
the Georgetown University Law
Center, where he; was Editoi of
the law review, Tax Lawyer.
The new Deputy Assistant
Administrator for the Office
of Policy, Planning, and
Evaluation is Daniel Esty.
Esty joined EPA in 1989 as a
Special Assistant to
Administrator William K. Reilly.
In 1990, he became Deputy Chief
of Staff of the Agency. Prior to
joining EPA, Esty practiced law
with the Washington, DC, law
firm of Arnold and Porter, where
he worked on international law.
administrative law, and
environmental issues.
In 1981, Esty graduated from
Harvard College, where he
received a B.A, in economics. He
later earned a B.A. in
philosophy, politics, and
economics from Balliol College
at Oxford University in England.
He continued his education at
Yale Law School, where he
received his J.D. in 1986.
Olive
Suzanne Olive has been named
Acting Director of the Office of
Civil Rights (OCR).
Olive has served as OCR's
Deputy Director since 1988 and
concurrently as the Associate
Director for Discrimination
Complaints and External
Compliance since 1987. Olive
began her career at EPA in 1983
as a senior equal opportunity
specialist for External
Compliance Programs. In 1985,
she assumed responsibility for
EPA's Discrimination
Complaints Program and
received the EPA Gold Medal for
performance in 1987. Olive
currently serves as the Data
Analysis Work Group Leader on
EPA's Cultural Diversity Task
Force.
Before joining EPA, Olive
worked for four years at the
Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission in the regulatory
development and review
process. She held various
supervisory positions in the
Office of Legal Counsel and the
Office of Interagency
Coordination from 1979 to 1983.
Olive began her career as a
clerk-typist at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture
(USDA) in 1963. At USDA, she
became a personnel staffing
specialist in the Office of
Management Services, Division
of Personnel, in 1970. In 1972,
she moved to the Office of Equal
Opportunity, working with both
the public and private sectors. In
the Contract Compliance
Division, she served as an equal
opportunity specialist and
became a supervisor in 1975.
From 1976 to 1979, she was a
supervisor in the Compliance
and Enforcement Division.
Olive received her B.S. degree
in zoology from the University of
Maryland, College Park campus,
in 1972.
Holmes
The new Acting Assistant
Administrator of the Office of
Administration and Resource
Management is Christian R.
Holmes.
Holmes came to EPA in 1989
as the Principal Deputy Assistant
Administrator in the Office of
Solid Waste and Emergency
Response.
In early 1991, Holmes became
the first National Program
Manager on federal facilities
issues and was appointed as
Deputy Assistant Administrator
for Federal Facilities in the
Office of Enforcement.
Prior to coming to EPA,
Holmes held a number of senior
public and private sector
positions. He was Vice President
and Corporate Secretary at the
Cooper Development Company
in Mountain View, California.
He was also Vice President at
The Cooper Companies in Menlo
Park, California.
From 1981 until 1987 he
served as Director of the U.S.
Trade and Development Program
for the International
Development and Cooperation
Agency in Washington, DC. He
was also the Executive Director
for the President's Task Force at
the Agency for International
Private Enterprise. Holmes
served two years as Principal
Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State, for the Bureau of Refugees
Program, at the Department of
State, in Washington, DC.
In 1976, Holmes became!
Deputy Director of the Office of
U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance
at the Agency for International
Development (AID), where he
started as Assistant to the
Administrator for AID. Holmes
was also the Administrative
Assistant to Congressman
William Mailliard.
Holmes received his B.A.
degree in government at
Wesleyan University,
Connecticut. In 1982, Holmes
received an Honorary M.A.
degree from Wesleyan in
63
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Ginsberg
White
Stahl
Reich
recognition of his public service
achievements. He is also the
recipient of the Arthur S.
Flemming award, the
Presidential Meritorious Service
award, EPA's Gold Medal, and
the U.S. Army Soldiers Medal
for Heroism.
Gail C. Ginsberg is the new
Regional Counsel in Region 5 in
the Office of the Assistant
Administrator for Enforcement.
Previously, since 1979,
Ginsberg served as an Assistant
U.S. Attorney for the Northern
District of Illinois. In that
capacity, she handled civil
litigation on behalf of numerous
federal agencies. Ginsberg's case
load included cases involving
environmental issues, civil
rights, employment
discrimination, medical
malpractice, and administrative
law. She represented EPA in a
variety of matters, including
water and air enforcement cases,
wetlands cases, a major RCRA
subpoena challenge, and a
number of pre-enforcement
review cases.
Prior to her service in the U.S.
Attorney's Office, Ginsberg
worked as an attorney in EPA's
Legal Support Section,
Enforcement Division, Region 5,
from 1974 to 1979. In 1977, she
became chief of that section.
Ginsburg also served as a public
affairs officer for the Agency for
International Development from
1966 to 1969.
Ginsburg graduated in 1966
from Pembroke College at Brown
University, where she received
her B.A. in political science. She
obtained her J.D. in 1973 from
the Washington College of Law
at American University.
William A. White is the new
Associate Enforcement Counsel
for Superfund.
White came to EPA from the
Washington, DC, office of the
Philadelphia-based law firm of
Dechert, Price, and Rhodes,
which he joined in 1971; he
became a partner in the firm in
1979 and was managing partner
in Washington for two years.
White focused his practice on
federal environmental law,
having been especially active in
natural resources litigation. Most
recently, he dealt extensively
with Superfund issues, solid and
hazardous waste regulation, as
well as environmental permitting
and enforcement matters.
White received both his B.A.
and J.D. degrees from the
University of Wisconsin at
Madison in 1967 and 1971,
respectively. While in law
school, he was Editor of the
University of Wisconsin Law
Review and graduated with
highest academic standing. He
later went on to clerk for Judge
Feikens of the U.S. District Court
for Michigan's Eastern District.
Michael M. Stahl is the new
Director of the Office of
Compliance Monitoring, within
the Office of Pesticides and
Toxic Substances.
Prior to his current
appointment, Stahl served for
three years as a division director
in the Office of Toxic
Substances, managing the
Agency's asbestos-in-buildings
program, coordinating toxics
programs with EPA regional
offices and state agencies, and
enhancing public participation
in toxics programs.
From 1984 to 1987, he worked
in EPA's Asbestos Action
Program, becoming its Director
in 1986. Stahl began his federal
service in 1980 as a Presidential
Management Intern at the
Consumer Product Safety
Commission, where he served as
a special assistant to the
Executive Director.
Stahl received his B.A. degree
in criminal justice
administration from the
University of Missouri, St. Louis,
in 1975. After working for three
years in the Missouri Senate as
an assistant to the majority floor
leader, he obtained his M.A. in
Public Administration from the
University of Missouri, Columbia
campus, in 1980.
Edward E. Reich is the new
Acting Enforcement Chief. Reich
joined EPA in 1970 as a program
advisor for the Office of Air
Programs.
His tenure in EPA's
Enforcement Office began in
1971 as program advisor in the
Office of Enforcement and
General Counsel. In 1972, he
became Chief of the Enforcement
Proceedings Branch, within the
same office, where he held the
position for a total of five years
during two periods of service.
Reich left federal service and
served as the Deputy General
Counsel of Petroleum
International Associates in
Washington, DC, for one year
between 1974 and 1975.
For the next 10 years, Reich
was Director of the Stationary
Source Compliance Division in
the Office of Air and Radiation.
He returned in 1986 to the
Office of Enforcement and
Compliance Monitoring, where
he was an Associate
Enforcement Counsel for two
years. Beginning in 1988, he
held the position of Deputy
Assistant Administrator for
Enforcement and Compliance
Monitoring until his previous
appointment.
Reich is a graduate of Queens
College in New York City, where
he received a B.A. degree in
political science. He also
received a J.D. from Georgetown
University Law Center in
Washington, DC.
Raymond B. Ludwiszewski has
been named Acting General
Counsel.
Prior to this appointment, he
held the position of Acting
Assistant Administrator for the
Office of Enforcement. Earlier,
Ludwiszewski served as Deputy
General Counsel and Chief of
Staff to the Deputy
Administrator from 1989 to
1990.
Before joining EPA,
Ludwiszewski was associated,
from 1988 to 1989, with the
Washington law firm of Wilrner,
Cutler, and Pickering in the
litigation department, working
on civil and criminal cases.
Previously, at the Justice
Department, he served as the
Associate Deputy Attorney
General between 1987 and 1988.
From 1985 until 1986,
Ludwiszewski was Special
Counsel to the Assistant
Attorney General in the Land
and Natural Resources Division
at the Justice Department.
From 1984 to 1985, he clerked
for Judge Henry J. Friendly of
the United States Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit
located in New York City.
In 1984 Ludwiszewski
graduated magna cum laude
from Harvard Law School, where
he served on the Harvard Law
Review. Ludwiszewski is also a
graduate of Northeastern
University in Boston,
Massachusetts, where he
received a B.A. degree in
political science, with
concentrations in public
administration and economics,
in 1981. D
EPA JOURNAL
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Workers inspect "cap" of clean sediment
placed over a contaminated area in Puget
Sound's Commencement Bay, a
Superfund site. See news item on page 6.
Photo by Michael C. Stoner of EPA.
Back Cover: Sampling air quality during
cleanup of a central New Jersey
Superfund site. Photo by Cabe Palmer for
the Stock Market.
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