Superfund is the name commonly used for the federal program to clean up hazardous waste sites, which is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The program was created by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), which has been copied by many states, which have their own “Superfund” programs. The program is called “Superfund” because CERCLA created a special government fund to help pay for the clean-up of abandoned hazardous waste sites.

The passage of the Superfund law reflected growing public concern with hazardous waste sites, an issue that had been largely overlooked in the burst of environmental legislation that Congress had passed in the early 1970s. Public interest in the issue was brought to a head by the case of Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, from which the state had evacuated 237 families in 1978. The neighborhood had been built alongside a former industrial waste site, which began leaching the chemicals that had been dumped into it for decades, damaging the health of the residents who had never been informed of the hazard.

Under the Superfund law, the EPA determines whether a hazardous waste site qualifies for the clean-up program by assessing the threat the site poses to human health and the environment. Every state has had at least one site on the Superfund list, with New Jersey having the largest number of sites. Once a site is listed, EPA (or other federal agencies, if the site is owned by the government) develops a plan to clean up the site.

The Superfund law has been pathbreaking in a number of respects. First, it holds companies (and municipalities) financially responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste sites even if dumping the wastes was legal at the time they were brought to the site. The Superfund law imposes “strict liability,” meaning that if you had disposed of any wastes at a hazardous site, you are considered liable, even if you did nothing considered legally negligent. And liability is “retroactive,” applying to wastes that were dumped before the law was passed.

The second unusual feature of the law concerns the Superfund itself, which is based on the principle of “polluter pays.” The fund was established to pay for a site clean-up if the waste had been dumped by a company that no longer existed, or if it was impossible to determine who was responsible. The Superfund was financed by new taxes on the chemical and petroleum industries and other industries most likely to have dumped hazardous wastes. In 1995, the year the taxing authority under the law expired, the Superfund taxes brought in about $1.5 billion. Congress has generally appropriated about $250 million a year out of general tax revenues to cover some of the program’s administrative costs.

The Superfund program has succeeded at cleaning up sites, but at a slower rate than originally expected. As of September 1998, EPA had listed 1,370 sites, but clean-up was complete at only 176 of them.

The Superfund program has become increasingly controversial as debates have developed over how to make the program more efficient and less costly. Industry has sought to change the liability scheme in the law, which has produced an enormous amount of litigation as each entity that dumped wastes at a site tries to limit its own liability. Industry and some municipalities have also sought to change the standard for cleaning up a site so that more wastes can be contained—preventing them from leaching into drinking water, for example—rather than being removed or treated.