An investigation of the Superfund program by the Center for Public Integrity, ‘Wasting Away: Superfund’s Toxic Legacy,” reveals that 50 percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of the 1,304 active and proposed Superfund sites, and 100 schools are located within one mile of them. Since the inception of Superfund 27 years ago, fewer than one in five sites has been cleaned up sufficiently to be removed from the National Priorities List. EPA collected $320 million from polluters under the “polluter pays” principle in 1999. By 2006, that figure had dropped to just $60 million. EPA has reduced the number of “construction complete” sites it expects to achieve in 2007 from 40 to 24. The target for 2008 is 30, according to the EPA budget for 2008. The Center examined an EPA document listing approximately 100 companies partly or wholly responsible for contamination at 700 Superfund sites (40 percent of the total). Between 1998 and 2005, the responsible companies disclosed expenditures of more than $1 billion to lobby the federal government and more than $120 million in contributions to federal campaigns. EPA has determined that the threat to humans from dangerous and sometimes carcinogenic substances is “not under control” at 114 sites across the country, according to the investigation. In addition, the study reveals that EPA has collected $709 million from potentially responsible parties during the past seven years and placed the money into more than 500 special site-specific accounts. As a result, the money is not available to clean up other Superfund sites. The EPA Inspector General has criticized the agency for holding these funds in the special accounts longer than necessary. The Center has set up a “Wasting Away” Web site with an interactive list of all 1,623 active, proposed and deleted Superfund sites. One can search the list by company and state for details on location, status, size, types of contaminants and nearby population, as well as EPA contractors hired to clean up the sites. The Center plans to release additional information examining human exposure at the most contaminated Superfund sites, four companies that avoided paying more than $500 million in cleanup costs by declaring bankruptcy and EPA contractors. The first section of the two-part investigation is available at: www.publicintegrity.org/superfund

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