National Priorities List

History and Background

The Superfund Program was created in response to the environmental disasters of 1970s, most prominently the chemical exposure at Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York; the dioxin exposure at Times Beach, Missouri; and the toxic waste at the “Valley of the Drums,” near Louisville, Kentucky. The political consensus of the time was that it was necessary to establish a program to safely dispose of this toxic material and to return hazardous sites to a safe condition, protecting the health of members of the community as well as the environment.

To this end, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980, authorizing the EPA to remove hazardous waste and clean up toxic waste sites that threaten public health and the environment. The act provides for removal actions, where immediate and localized dangers are removed from public exposure, and remedial actions, where long-term response is required to return a polluted site to a safe condition. Remedial actions include, for instance, capping and monitoring landfills; excavating and disposing of river sediments; pumping and treating groundwater; and incinerating or biologically treating soils. The EPA is required to give preferences to treatments that permanently reduce the potency of hazardous substances, rather than those that merely move the waste to other locations.

The act also provided for a tax on polluting industries, such as chemical and oil companies, to fund these cleanup efforts. When this tax expired in 1995, however, it was not reinstated by the Republican Congress of the time. Superfund has since experienced a chronic shortage of funds for cleanup efforts.

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