Environmental Law Blog

In 1976, the United States Congress passed the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA. The RCRA required companies to properly manage and dispose of hazardous wastes generated in production or manufacturing operations at the facility. Initially Congress believed that with the passage of RCRA, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, it had protected human health and the environment from pollutants and contaminants generated by American business.

However, the discovery of such sites as the Love Canal Site and Missouri's own Times Beach Site revealed that something was missing. In late 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, commonly known as the Superfund Law, to fill in that "hole" in the environmental regulatory universe. The Superfund Law included a number of provisions, but chief among them was the goal of promoting the clean up of sites that had been contaminated by historical site operations, as opposed to preventing future contamination, which is the goal of RCRA. Under the Superfund Law, the federal government had the authority to order clean up of a site, or do the clean up itself and then seek to recover those response costs from liable parties. The parties who could be held liable included not only parties who owned the contaminated property, but also those parties who generated the contaminants (even where the generation had occurred years earlier) and parties who had transported the hazardous substances to the site.

Is it fair to make generators and transporters liable as if they were the dumper?  Would historical contamination ever be fully remediated otherwise?

In our next post, we will look at how Superfund works when there is an ongoing release of a hazardous substance.