"A U.S. appeals court rejected on Tuesday a legal challenge by General Electric Co to the federal Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) orders that direct companies to clean up hazardous waste."
The Superfund tax on oil and chemical companies that helped support cleanup of abandoned hazardous waste sites expired in 1995. Now the Obama administration plans an effort to revive it.
In 1981, EPA labeled the 26-acre Price's Pit landfill in New Jersey as the most serious environmental problem in the U.S. Thirty years later, a permanent remedy is just beginning and residents nearby are wondering about their long-term health problems.
The Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program has been slow to start and finish hundreds of cleanups.
"Environmentalist Jeff Spoelstra says an 80-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River that runs through toxin-laced land in southwestern Michigan was on its way to becoming safe again. ...Then, in January 2009, Lyondell Chemical Co. filed for bankruptcy protection. The Houston-based petrochemical giant argued in court that as it reorganized, it could avoid what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said were about $2.5 billion in cleanup costs...."
EPA added Brooklyn's long-polluted Gowanus Canal to the Superfund National Priority List -- along with nine other sites. The designation means that EPA will oversee the cleanup. New York City Mayor Bloomberg had been pushing for a city-run cleanup.
"The U.S. arm of chemical giant LyondellBasell is in negotiations to settle its environmental cleanup liabilities — which include the Kalamazoo River Superfund site — with the U.S. government, according to a company spokesman."
"General Electric Co. and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offered different lessons Wednesday on the first year of PCB Hudson River dredging -- starting with how much PCBs were removed."
"An exhaustive report on Portland Harbor contamination -- written by industries and local government agencies that will likely have to pay for much of the cleanup -- tends to 'minimize the risks to human health and the environment' from harbor pollution, federal regulators say."
"Hudson River dredging released almost 25 times more PCBs into the water than expected, General Electric said Thursday in calling for changes in performance standards before the massive Superfund cleanup resumes."
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