EPA releases $1B to clean up toxic sites in 24 states

Nearly 50 toxic waste sites around the U.S. will be

cleaned up, and ongoing work at dozens

of others will get a funding boost, as federal environmental officials announced Friday a $1 billion infusion to the Superfund program.

The money comes from the $1 trillion

infrastructure bill that President Joe

Biden signed into law last month and will help officials tackle a

backlog of highly polluted Superfund

sites in 24 states that have languished for years because of a

lack of funding, the Environmental Protection Agency said.

About 60% of the sites to be cleaned up are in low-income and minority communities that have

suffered disproportionately from contamination left by

shuttered manufacturing plants, landfills and other abandoned industrial operations.

“No community should have to live in the shadows of contaminated waste

sites,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan

said Friday at a news conference at the Lower Darby Creek

Superfund site in Philadelphia, where

a former landfill leached chemicals

into soil and groundwater in the largely minority Eastwick neighborhood.

“With this funding, communities living

near many of these most serious uncontrolled or abandoned releases of contamination will finally get the protection

they deserve,” said Regan, who has made environmental justice a top priority.

The funding is the first installment of a

$3.5 billion appropriation to the Superfund

program from the bipartisan infrastructure law. The announcement

comes a day after Regan disclosed plans to release $2.9 billion

in infrastructure law funds for lead pipe removal nationwide and to impose stricter rules to limit exposure to lead, a significant health hazard.

Sites to be cleaned up under the Superfund program include one in Roswell, New Mexico, where

dry cleaners that went out of business

almost 60 years ago laced the aquifer with toxic solvents; dozens of residential

backyards in Lockport, New York, where a former felt

manufacturer contaminated the soil with lead; and a residential and commercial district in Pensacola, Florida, where the defunct American Creosote Works once used toxic preservatives to treat wood poles and fouled the neighborhood’s soil and groundwater.