EPA Launches New Plan to Speed Up Hazardous Waste Site Cleanups

The EPA is rolling out a sweeping effort on Wednesday to more quickly clean up the nation’s Superfund sites contaminated by hazardous waste, the agency’s number two official said.

Stakeholders on both sides of the aisle agree that Superfund cleanups too often get bogged down in procedural delays and legal disputes. The new program, known as the Superfund Solutions Initiative, aims to build on that effort while addressing several themes the Trump administration has prioritized: delivering tangible results to communities, cutting through bureaucratic red tape, and pushing more authority down to the states.

The initiative is composed of a broad set of tools to address the wide variety of snags that can slow down any given Superfund cleanup.

“There’s no one quick fix that will address the delays that we’ve seen at different stages of the Superfund process,” David Fotouhi, deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview. “This is a multi-step, all-of-the-above approach to expediting the process to get these sites back into productive reuse.”

Superfund sites have been linked to acute and chronic illnesses, including higher rates of cancer, due to the toxins they leak into the soil, water, and air. The sites are also notorious for pushing down property values and perpetuating urban blight.

One part of the initiative will focus on better project management. The EPA wants to speed up ongoing investigations at more than 500 Superfund sites to move them from the evaluation phase, where they’re now languishing, to the cleanup phase. It also wants to get site teams into communities sooner by ramping up water, soil, and air sampling, as well as facility and land inspections.

Also under the project management category, the EPA will try to speed the process of picking the best cleanup approach—a common snag at many Superfund projects—by more rapidly doing remedial investigations and feasibility studies and rendering records of decision. The EPA will further streamline its use of licensed contractors, which it believes will cut cleanup timelines by up to a year.

Another part of the program will deploy the EPA’s tools and authorities earlier in the process. For example, the EPA will concurrently evaluate all the options for a site under Superfund, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act hazardous waste cleanup program, and the Brownfields program, rather than waiting for analyses to be completed one at a time, Fotouhi said.

Working With States

The agency wants to get short-term projects underway to provide immediate protections while comprehensive cleanup plans are being finalized, work more closely with states so they can manage cleanup work on their own, and standardize approaches by type of site or contaminant so federal and state agencies don’t have to waste time developing approaches that already exist.

“There are opportunities where states may be able to take the lead on a particular site, and they’re better suited to doing that—particularly if the site does not present novel issues and it’s something that the state is very capable of handling,” Fotouhi said. “So we’re looking to prioritize that approach.”

The initiative further seeks to sharpen the EPA’s use of science. At residential lead cleanup sites, the EPA will base its decisions on a single target blood lead level for Superfund decisions, as laid out in the agency’s October residential lead directive. At legacy hard rock mining sites, the agency wants to assess whether critical minerals could be recovered—another priority of the Trump administration.

Already, the EPA has had success accelerating cleanups, Fotouhi said. For example, at the West Lake Landfill site in Missouri, the agency shaved about two years off the cleanup schedule, he said.

While there is bipartisan buy-in for improvements to the Superfund process, some environmentalists say a key reason cleanups drag on is because it takes time to do the science correctly, and that, when dozens of parties are potentially responsible for the contamination, even a small difference can mean millions of dollars in liability costs.

Fotouhi said he’s mindful of those concerns.

“We need to ensure that, while we are expediting these procedural steps, we’re not cutting corners on science or protectiveness, and the team here is fully committed to that goal,” he said. “At no point will we take an action simply for the sake of time.”

Fotouhi also noted the Superfund program has built-in safeguards to ensure the wrong decisions aren’t made in haste.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the EPA has cleaned up more than 59 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and water and recovered $864 million from responsible parties, according to the agency.

Separately, the EPA on Tuesday proposed two rules addressing Superfund cost recovery, under which citizens can be reimbursed if they’ve had to take cleanup actions that a polluter should have addressed.