U.S. environmental regulators on Tuesday announced a new $1 billion cleanup project at 25 hazardous waste sites from New Jersey to Oregon.
These sites are covered by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, created in 1980 to help repurpose land contaminated by heavy industry for new economic development such as parks and warehouses. .
The $1 billion is the third and final wave of $3.5 billion in funding provided by the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in 2021 by U.S. President Joe Biden.
“This funding will help improve the lives of people, especially those who have been on the front lines of pollution for years,” EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe told reporters on a conference call.
]A billboard seen at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, DC, on May 10, 2021.REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo (Reuters/Andrew Kelly/File Photo)
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McCabe said 75 percent of the 25 sites are in historically underserved communities. His $1 billion will also help speed up ongoing work at his 85 Superfund locations. More than 25 percent of black and Hispanic Americans live within three miles (5 kilometers) of a Superfund site, McCabe said.
New Jersey has more Superfund sites than any other state, with three of the 25 sites used for smelting, including Old Bridge and Raritan Bay Slag in Sayreville. Seawalls and piers were constructed using slag, a waste product from the bottom of industrial blast furnaces. Metal from the 1960s and 1970s.
U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey has called for a $23 billion injection into the Superfund over five years after the infrastructure bill and Biden’s anti-inflation law reinstate taxes on “polluter pays” programs. He said the funding is expected to work well.
“Reinstating the Superfund tax is simply about basic fairness in that polluting companies, not taxpayers, have to pay to clean up the mess they have created,” Pallone told reporters. Ta.
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The EPA said the funds will go to Northwest Pipe, located in Clackamas, Oregon, where the pipes were manufactured and painted from the 1950s to the 1980s, contaminating soil and groundwater with solvents, primers, coal tar, and other contaminants. & Casing/Hall Process Company’s premises will be used to clean it up.Said
