Superfund

The name Superfund referred originally to the remediation trust fund established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). CERCLA was passed on December 11, 1980, in the last few weeks of Jimmy Carter's presidential administration, by a lame-duck Congress. The phrase “Superfund sites” refers to those containing hazardous material and abandoned by corporations or government entities. They include landfills, abandoned mines, old manufacturing sites, and even former military complexes. Often, as in the case of landfills, one site can have hundreds of “potentially responsible parties,” making a coordinated cleanup effort difficult. A single site can take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to remediate.

Superfund activities are often prominent topics in environmental journalism and for good reason. Nearly half of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of an active or proposed Superfund site listed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of these sites and U.S. Census population data for the year 2000. However, there is no actual “fund,” let alone a “super” fund, today. The tax supporting this effort expired in 1996 and the trust fund ran out of money in 2003. Today “Superfund” simply refers more generally, in the words of the EPA Superfund Web site, to the program created to deal with “abandoned hazardous waste sites.”

Starting in 1980, the fund was fed by a small federal excise (value added) tax of 0.72 cents per 42-gallon barrel on petroleum and from 22 cents to $4.82 per ton of chemical feedstock (there was a list of 42 feedstocks taxed; the highest tax was on xylene, an industrial alcohol). The list expanded and the tax increased over the years, topping out at [Page 849]8.2 cents per barrel for domestic crude oil and 11.7 cents per barrel on imported petroleum products in 1986. This was changed to 9.7 cents a barrel, regardless of source (Pub. L. No. 101-221) after an international trade complaint. It amounted to less than a third of a cent per gallon of gasoline.

Congress's motivation was seemingly obvious. CERCLA was signed into law after the Love Canal debacle. Love Canal was the most notorious of many hazardous waste sites that endangered public health. But there had been no federal law that specifically addressed the issue. States were left to clean up the messes, but the states had few technical or monetary resources to do so. CERCLA allowed the federal Environmental Protection Agency to order the “remediation” of hazardous sites by responsible parties or to do the remediation itself and then demand repayment by those parties.