EPA Celebrates 30 Years of The Superfund Program and initiates an Integrated Cleanup Initiative

• Date: December 15, 2010
• Source: Admin

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) celebrates its 30-year-old Superfund program as well as working towards making it stronger and more effective. It is focusing on dealing with cleaning up hazardous waste sites, a constantly changing challenge. The Superfund or the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) came into effect in December 1980 in order to deal with the sites in the United States that were the most complex, uncontrolled, polluted, or abandoned.

Mathy Stanislaus, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response commented, “Superfund has protected thousands of communities by cleaning up hazardous waste sites in the United States and responding to thousands of chemical spills. While Superfund has clearly accomplished a great deal, we also recognize that the challenges facing the program today are different than those we faced 30 years ago. Through our new Integrated Cleanup Initiative we are implementing new practices to meet these evolving challenges.”

The Integrated Cleanup Initiative (ICI) aims to speedup cleaning up of the contaminated sites in the possible areas, deal with a larger number of contaminated sites, and make them productive, while at the same time protecting the environment and human health. ICI intends to make the EPA’s land cleanup programs more transparent and accountable to the communities.

The Superfund has received at least $600 million from the Recovery Act, which was put to good use in accelerating cleanups and starting new construction projects. The Superfund has also worked diligently to clean up sites and put to productive use approximately 1.3 million acres.

The Recovery Act

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 came into effect in February 2009. It was a direct response to the economic crisis affecting the country at that time. The Act has three immediate goals:
 

• Create new jobs and save existing ones
• Spur economic activity and invest in long-term growth
• Foster unprecedented levels of accountability and transparency in government spending

http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/The_Act.aspx