Hazardous Waste

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act's Corrective Action Program seeks to minimize the federal burden of cleaning up hazardous waste sites by having current operating facilities clean up their hazardous waste contamination, thereby preventing them from becoming Superfund sites. Although the program has been in effect since 1984, concerns have been raised that companies are not cleaning up their facilities quickly enough and that the properties remain contaminated, posing risks to public health and the environment. This report discusses (1) the progress made in cleaning up facilities under the program; (2) the factors affecting progress; and (3) any initiatives that the Environmental Protection Agency, the states, and industry have taken to accomplish cleanups.

GAO noted that: (1) only about 8 percent of the nonfederal facilities nationwide that treat, store, or dispose of hazardous waste, including about 5 percent of the facilities considered to pose the highest risk, have completed cleanup actions, according to EPA's data; (2) about 56 percent of the facilities, including about 35 percent of those posing the highest risk, have yet to begin the formal cleanup process; (3) some facilities have undertaken cleanup actions outside of the program; however, the extent of these efforts is unknown because they are not reflected in EPA's program data; (4) according to EPA, state, and company cleanup managers: (a) cleaning up the contaminated facilities under the program is time-consuming and costly because the process EPA developed for cleanups, and which some states authorized to implement the program have adopted, has multiple reporting and review requirements; (b) EPA, the states, and companies often disagree on how cleanup should be pursued, which prolongs the cleanup process because more time is needed to negotiate cleanup terms, and companies must sometimes meet the duplicate requirements of both federal and state regulators; (c) unless EPA or the states direct the companies to begin cleanup, the companies appear to perform cleanups only when they have business incentives to do so; and (d) EPA and the states lack the resources they need to direct more companies to begin their cleanups and to provide timely oversight at the facilities already performing cleanups; (5) EPA, some states, and industry have undertaken initiatives to streamline the cleanup process and make cleanup decisions on the basis of risk, rather than on the basis of the more generic process specified for the program; (6) EPA and the states are looking for ways to leverage their limited resources to accomplish cleanups more quickly, including putting facilities into alternative programs that streamline cleanups; (7) while these initiatives promise to allow faster and cheaper cleanups, some of them may involve tradeoffs in the stringency of the standards applied, the permanence of the remedies selected, and the level of public participation required; (8) these tradeoffs increase the need for long-term oversight to ensure that the remedies continue to protect human health and the environment; (9) although companies' cleanup managers favor many of the initiatives, several of them expressed reservations about EPA's and the states' willingness to use these initiatives; and (10) EPA's strategy of adopting new approaches to corrective action may not be sufficient to ensure that the approaches are implemented nationwide.

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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