Superfund

Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act on December 11, 1980. The act itself, along with the environmental cleanup program it established and the trust fund used to finance the cleanups, is commonly referred to as Superfund. The chief purpose of Superfund was to give the federal government, principally the Environmental Protection Agency, the authority and resources needed to respond to releases of hazardous substances that endanger public health or the environment. The act levied a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries, providing funds—about $1.6 billion in the five years after the legislation was enacted—to be used to clean up abandoned or uncontrolled waste sites. A chief motive for establishing Superfund was recognition that some hazardous waste sites were large and, in many cases, created by companies that either no longer existed or simply did not have the resources to carry out the cleanup. They had to be cleaned up. The law either made responsible parties do so or, when necessary, provided public funds for the task.

Superfund represented an important capstone for an array of environmental legislation enacted beginning in the 1970s, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and numerous others. The issue of major toxic waste sites and what to do with them came to the attention of the American public through publicity surrounding places like Love Canal in New York.

Love Canal was originally conceived as a model home community in Niagara Falls. That plan, along with a scheme to build a canal connecting two levels of the Niagara River separated by Niagara Falls, was never realized, but in the 1920s the site was turned into a landfill and industrial chemical dump site. In the 1950s the company that owned the land covered it with earth and sold it to the city. Homes and a school were built there, but by the late 1970s Love Canal had turned into an environmental nightmare, with toxic chemicals and sometimes the drums containing them percolating up from the soil. Many of the chemicals that appeared as noxious puddles in people's yards and basements were carcinogens, and Love Canal's residents experienced disturbingly high rates of birth defects, miscarriages, leukemia, and other disorders. Other major environmental disasters that came to light included the pollution that virtually destroyed Times Beach in Missouri and the “Valley of the Drums” near Louisville, Kentucky, where thousands of drums of toxic waste were simply dumped.