Superfund Site Group Gets Appeals Court OK to Seek Cleanup Costs

A district court’s interpretation of the liability for hazardous waste disposed at a Superfund site was tossed by a federal appeals court Tuesday.

Entities that arrange for disposal of hazardous waste can still be held liable for remediation efforts even if they didn’t realize it was hazardous at the time, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., found.

The decision reversed the US District Court for the District of Maryland decision that a group seeking to recoup costs of a cleanup needed to claim that the other parties knew the waste was hazardous when arranging for its disposal.

“To sufficiently claim arranger liability, a plaintiff must allege that a defendant intended to dispose of waste and that the waste was in fact hazardous,” a three-judge panel wrote in its decision. “But a plaintiff need not allege that a defendant knew its waste was hazardous.”

The issue arose in a case involving remediation of seven landfill sites in Maryland. Entities that paid for remediation work formed the 68th Street Site Work Group, which sued other entities who had sent waste to the site but who neither contributed to remediation costs nor settled. The suit “sought contribution for past costs as well as a declaratory judgment that the defendants would be liable for contribution to any future costs,” according to court documents.

The district court moved to dismiss most of the 68th Street group’s claims, and the group then filed a motion to amend its suit to comply with those rulings and bolster its allegations. The court denied that motion, too. The group then appealed to the Fourth Circuit seeking a reversal of the district court’s rulings.

The appeals court on Tuesday vacated the lower court’s denial after conducting its own review of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, also known as CERCLA or the Superfund law. It found the law specifies instances in which lack of knowledge precludes liability for hazardous waste, but arranging for disposal is not one of those instances.

“Had Congress intended to include a knowledge requirement as part of arranger liability, it easily could have done so,” the judges wrote. “But Congress did not do so.”

The case is remanded to district court to reconsider the 68th Street Site Work Group’s amended complaint.

Justis Law Firm LLC represents the 68th Street Site Work Group. Saul Ewing LLP, Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, Neal Gerber & Eisenberg LLP, and Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott LLC are among the firms representing the defendants.

The case is 68th Street Site Work Group v. Alban Tractor Co., 4th Cir., No. 23-01155, Opinion 6/25/24