Making goods we use often harms the environment. Probably starting in prehistoric times until after the Second World War, no one gave it a thought.

Now, when we find land has been poisoned, we must clean it up before reusing it. Redevelopment of brownfields and Superfund sites offers numerous environmental and economic benefits.

Brownfields are contaminated tracts of mostly urban property once used for some kind of commercial or industrial use. They can be abandoned, idled, or just underused, but they leave behind some kind of toxic contamination.

Superfund sites differ from brownfields because their level of contamination poses a direct threat to human health.

The legal and regulatory framework

Congress created Superfund 1980 with the passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. Since then, more than 1,700 sites have been listed in the Superfund’s National Priority List (NPL).

Nearly 900 have been cleaned up enough to allow some reuse. As of February 2018, 399 sites have been declared fully cleaned up and deleted from the list. It takes a long time to delist a site, but it usually doesn’t take that long to put it to new use.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started its Brownfields Program in 1995. It provides grants to help local governments and other stakeholders identify and clean up brownfields. Brownfield reclamation increases local property tax bases and helps provide new jobs. Congress codified EPA practices in 2002 with passage of the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act.

The US has more than 450,000 brownfields. The presence or potential presence of hazardous substances complicates their expansion, redevelopment, or reuse. Brownfields present more of an economic and social threat than an environmental threat.

Businesses that frequently create and leave brownfields include manufacturing plants, chemical storage facilities, oil refineries, railroads, dry cleaners, and gas stations.

One abandoned gas station can cause problems in a neighborhood. Numerous empty properties in a neighborhood create blight. If enough inner-city commercial or industrial companies go out of business or move, remaining owners may have trouble selling their sites. So enough abandoned sites may lead directly to more abandoned sites. Reclamation of brownfields revitalizes neighborhoods and provides an alternative to taking over open land for development.

An example of a brownfield

When a community finds toxic contamination on a piece of land, the EPA investigates. The investigation determines what kind of contaminants the site holds, how serious they are, and where they came from. A recently decided case shows the process.

Smurfit-Stone operated a paper mill near Frenchtown, Montana from 1957 to 2010. It’s on land to which some Native American tribes have inherent rights to fish and hunt guaranteed by an 1855 treaty.

The closure of the mill brought concerns about pollution from the various hazardous chemicals it either used or produced.

In 2011, the EPA began to consider whether it should be designated a Superfund site. The mill had occupied 3,200 acres that comprised three different sections, called operable units in EPA jargon. The EPA investigated each one separately. It collected and analyzed samples of soil, surface water, and groundwater.

The first, or OU1, is 1,200 acres of land mostly used for agriculture. The EPA concluded that it poses no concerns for human health.

OU2, 255 acres, covers the mill’s footprint. Levels of manganese in the groundwater exceeded EPA’s maximum standard. Ingesting that water would pose a non-cancer hazard to anyone who might hypothetically live or work on construction projects there.

OU3, 1,700 acres included the settling ponds, parts of a river flood plain, and two creeks. It showed the greatest potential for problems, but the level of most contaminants presents no unacceptable risk. Manganese, cobalt, arsenic, dioxin, and the chemical Arclor-1254 do pose potential cancer and non-cancer risks to subsistence fishers and anyone who might live there in the future. As it stands now, though, the levels are not an active threat.

The EPA’s preliminary decision, therefore, is that the site doesn’t merit designation as a Superfund site. But it does present identifiable hazards. It is a brownfield. Smurfit-Stone bears the responsibility to clean it up.

The consequences of Superfund designation

If the results of an investigation indicate a Superfund site, the EPA places it on the National Priorities List (NPL) and designates the polluting companies as “Potentially Responsible Parties” (PRPs). Very often, this designation triggers lawsuits that can take years to work through the courts.

Cleanup can take several different forms. For example, it may entail removing soil and treating it, removing soil and disposing of it elsewhere, or leaving the toxic wastes in place and capping them. Once the local public knows a site is on the NPL, it may hesitate to accept it even after remediation is complete. Developers may also hesitate to take risks on Superfund reclamation projects.

A disproportionate number of low income people live within three miles of a Superfund site. Superfund reclamation projects carry the danger of regentrification. That is, they can increase property values so much that these people can no longer afford to live there. Planning for remediation must therefore avoid perpetrating social injustice.

Some people whom pollution forced out of their homes might want to return to the area. It is possible to plan redevelopment of a Superfund site specifically for low-income housing. Decades of experience has shown the importance of involving local people early in the process to decide what to do with the land. The law requires different remediation standards for land intended for residential, commercial, or industrial use.

Failure to be more specific has resulted in too little or too much cleanup for eventual proposed uses. In particular, commercial use can cover anything from a daycare center to a parking lot. The daycare center requires more intensive cleanup than the parking lot. Trying to clean up a site without first knowing the eventual use of the reclaimed land only wastes resources.

Examples of redevelopment of Superfund sites

Bainbridge Island, Washington

The Wyckoff Company processed timber on Bainbridge Island in Washington from the 1900s to the 1970s. It used creosote, a derivative of coal tar.

Only in the 1980s did it become apparent that creosote rendered nearby seafood poisonous to eat. That part of Bainbridge Island was placed on the NPL in 1987.

Now, most of the property has been cleaned up and become Pritchard Park. It has new trails and a sandy beach. But the park ends at a steel wall topped with a barbed wire fence. It’s possible to smell the 650,000 gallons of chemicals on the other side of the fence.

Those five acres were the most heavily contaminated. That part hasn’t been cleaned up yet. Signs warn that the crabs and shellfish are still not fit to eat. It will probably take another ten years to clean it up and incorporate it into the park.

Bainbridge Island is historically significant for more than timber processing. During the Second World War, the federal government sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps. More than 200 residents of the island became the first wave of deportation, leaving from a dock near the factory. Pritchard Park now includes a memorial wall to commemorate the exclusion. Therefore, it helps heal from two kinds of wrongs from the past: environmental misuse of the land and social injustice to a class of residents.

South Kensingtown, Rhode Island

Not only industrial sites become Superfund sites. The town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island started dumping wastes on a tract of land in the 1930s. It accepted waste from residences, businesses, and institutions. No one thought to regulate the site for more than 30 years. No one thought of hazardous wastes as a separate category. A study in 1975 found a leachate plume under the dump that contaminated groundwater almost a quarter of a mile west of it.

The town upgraded its municipal solid waste treatment in 1967 with the opening of the Rose Hill Landfill, which operated until 1983. It seemed at the time that a landfill would solve the environmental problems caused by unregulated dumps. But it, too, accepted hazardous wastes. Leachate from the landfill injured wildlife and fish and contaminated nearby wells of drinking water. Both the old dump and the newer landfill became Superfund sites. They have been cleaned up but have remained closed.

Recently, South Kingstown, Narragansett, and the University of Rhode Island have contracted with Kearsarge Energy to develop the sites to produce solar power. Solar farms are one of the ways other municipalities have given new life to old landfills.

Solar farms on reclaimed brownfields or Superfund sites in poor neighborhoods can provide an answer to the problem of gentrification. They benefit local residents instead of displacing them. Placing solar farms there not only provides energy for the surrounding population. Every urban solar farm also prevents clearing of farmland or forests for solar energy.

Sources:
EPA clean up and reclamation of the former Smurfit Stone Mill site of concern to the CSKT / B.L. Azure, Char-Koosta News, March 1, 2018
Super idea: repurposing toxic sites to produce solar energy / Frank Carini, ecoRI News. April 14, 2018
U.S. Superfund sites offer lessons for the future / Lynne Peeples, GreenBiz. March 30, 2018
What is Superfund redevelopment? / Jane McGrath, How Stuff Works. May 5, 2008

Photo credits:
USEPA photos except
Memorial wall. Photo by Joe Mabel. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons