Polluter Pays? Not Any More
August 2004

Sierra Club

It used to be that the industries that created toxic waste also paid to clean it up. That was the principle behind the original Superfund law. But the Bush administration has abandoned the "polluter pays" principle and, this year, taxpayers will pick up virtually the entire bill for the cleanup of orphaned toxic-waste sites.

Superfund works. By June 2004, the program had cleaned up nearly 900 of the nation's most contaminated sites. A new Sierra Club report, "Communities at Risk," uses EPA data to identify health threats at 111 Superfund sites, and another 158 sites where the EPA has insufficient data about whether or not a threat still exists. The report includes a state-by-state breakdown of those 269 sites. One in four Americans lives within four miles of a Superfund toxic waste site.