Environmental Contamination: Toxic Waste

There have been several examples of “contaminated communities” in the United States. In the late 1970s, residents near Niagara Falls, New York, were confronted by the discovery of contaminants buried by Hooker Chemical in the “Love Canal” neighborhood. The Love Canal story anticipates the script for thousands of other contaminated neighborhoods and also inspired Superfund, an effort to control hazards and enable remediation of contaminated sites by holding potentially responsible parties liable for cleanup costs. Around the time of Love Canal, the dioxin contamination problem in Times Beach, Missouri, surfaced and gained notoriety. In both instances, residents were permanently relocated from their homes and community. In Jackson Township, New Jersey, wells were contaminated when leachate from the municipal landfill reached the Cohansey aquifer. A new water system was eventually provided. In Tacoma, Washington, residents learned that the soil on their properties was contaminated with heavy metals as the result of air pollution from the Asarco Smelter. Soil was excavated from around the houses and replaced. In Montclair, New Jersey, alpha and gamma radiation was released, exposing local residents to harm. In agricultural areas of California, pesticides have been implicated in children's birth defects. This is a brief sampling of residential toxic exposure scenarios.

Zoning intended to separate incompatible land uses has failed to isolate residential environments from contamination. Homes have been built atop old industrial sites, contaminated farm properties, operating or abandoned landfills, and wetlands filled with industrial wastes. Toxic materials have been illegally dumped in residential areas. Contaminated buildings have been renovated as housing. Pristine residential areas have been contaminated from fuel spills or leaking underground tanks at gasoline stations and other sites. Hazardous facilities have been located near existing “clean” residential areas, sometimes giving rise to NIMBY (not in my backyard) opposition from concerned citizens.

Contamination events affecting housing are of many types, making reliable statistics difficult to obtain. Some events are defined by the discovery of contaminants; a smaller number are identified through a disease cluster. One hard number for the extent of contamination in the United States has been the number of sites placed on the Superfund National Priority List as the result of an evaluation of the hazards they contain and their threat to humans and ecosystems. Although Superfund sites do not necessarily affect housing directly, a substantial number of sites have residential impacts.

As of September 2011, there were 62 proposed National Priorities List (NPL) sites in 34 states, reflecting proposed sites under evaluation for meeting Superfund cleanup requirements, with Ohio having the largest number (7). These include federal government sites and all other sites. Note that many federal sites are addressed outside of Superfund.

Table 1 displays Superfund data as of September 23, 2011. It breaks down data sequentially to reflect sites in the Superfund process 20 or more years, 10 to 20 years, and in the past 10 years. What is shown is that relatively little cleanup progress was made through 1991 beyond getting proposed sites listed. A decade later, in contrast, more than two thirds of listed sites had construction complete, and 17% had been delisted.

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