Superfund

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO studied the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) increased its hazardous waste site discovery efforts to determine the: (1) total possible number and types of sites that required investigation; (2) status of 837 sites EPA did not include in its 1985 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Information System (CERCLIS) inventory; (3) reasons why EPA did not place the sites on its National Priorities List (NPL); and (4) states' efforts to develop comprehensive inventories of their hazardous waste sites.

GAO found that, although 130,000 to 425,000 hazardous waste sites qualified for inclusion in CERCLIS, it contained only about 27,000 sites. GAO also found that EPA: (1) offered states little direction, guidance, or money to conduct site identification and had not reviewed any state programs to determine their adequacy; (2) assigned a higher priority to evaluating and cleaning up sites already on CERCLIS than to identifying additional potential sites; (3) limited its grants to states to evaluating reported sites; and (4) had not instructed its regions or the states as to when they should add sites to CERCLIS. In addition, GAO found that 494 of the 837 sites not included in 1985 CERCLIS were still missing from the inventory because the regions: (1) lacked sufficient funds; (2) wanted to first verify the presence of hazardous wastes; (3) believed that they could clean up the sites more efficiently without EPA involvement; or (4) felt obliged to report only those sites eligible for federal cleanup.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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