EPA Cleanup Approaches to Contaminated & Hazardous Waste Sites : The National Priorities List & the Superfund Alternative

Under the Superfund program, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) places some of the most seriously contaminated sites on the National Priorities List (NPL). At the end of fiscal year 2013, nonfederal sites made up about 90 percent of these sites. At these sites, EPA undertakes remedial action projects to permanently and significantly reduce contamination. Remedial action projects can take a considerable amount of time and money, depending on the nature of the contamination and other site-specific factors. This book examines, for fiscal years 1999 through 2013, the trends in the annual federal appropriations to the Superfund program and EPA expenditures for remedial cleanup activities at nonfederal sites on the NPL; and the number of nonfederal sites on the NPL, the number of remedial action project completions, and the number of construction completions at nonfederal NPL sites. Furthermore, the book examines how EPA addresses the cleanup of sites it has identified as eligible for the NPL; how the processes for implementing the Superfund Alternative (SA) and NPL approaches compare; and how SA agreement sites compare with similar NPL sites in completing the cleanup process.