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Measuring Land Revitalization Progress
- EPA's cleanup programs have returned over 900,000 previously contaminated acres to the community by making these acres ready for anticipated use. This is part of EPA's mission to ensure protectiveness and enable communities to put these properties to use.
- These 900,000 acres are out of a total of 480,000 sites and close to 15 million acres that EPA has addressed or is addressing through its cleanup and revitalization programs. The total acreage is comparable to the size of the state of West Virginia (15.4 million acres), or 0.6 percent of the total land in the United States.
- EPA has also made close to 12 million acres and over 380,000 sites protective for people.
- While EPA has made great strides to ensure sites are protective for people and construction has been complete, EPA has much work to do in returning these properties to the communities.
- This information comes from a recently released EPA report entitled, OSWER Cross Program Revitalization Measure (PDF) (12 pp, 99K, about PDF), which calculated the combined number of sites and acres addressed through the Agency's Superfund, Brownfields, RCRA, Underground Storage Tank and Emergency Management programs.
- EPA will continue to track progress on acres made protective for people and ready for reuse with annual reporting on these measures.
- Additional background resources for the cross program revitalization measures are now available online.
Cross Program Revitalization Measures Resources:
- Land Revitalization — The mission of EPA's Land Revitalization Team is to restore land and other natural resources into sustainable community assets that maximize beneficial economic, ecological and social uses and ensure protection of human health and the environment.
- Superfund redevelopment success stories — Superfund Redevelopment at EPA helps communities return some of the nation's worst hazardous waste sites to safe and productive uses. In addition to cleaning up these Superfund sites and making them protective of human health and the environment, the Agency is working with communities and other partners in considering future use opportunities and integrating appropriate reuse options into the cleanup process. The Agency is also working with communities at sites that have already been cleaned up to ensure long-term stewardship of the sites remedies and to promote reuse.
- Brownfields redevelopment success stories — Brownfields Success Stories highlight the accomplishments of EPA brownfields grantees across the country. These accomplishments include transforming brownfields into thriving new centers of commerce and industry; creating jobs through cleanup and reuse; formatting innovative partnerships among federal, state, and local governments and private-sector stakeholders such as developers and lenders; training residents of brownfields communities for high-wage environmental careers; and countless other examples of how brownfields restoration has positively impacted local economies and the quality of life for neighboring communities.
- Cleanups in My Community is a mapping and listing tool that shows sites where pollution is being or has been cleaned up throughout the United States.
- OSWER's Center for Program Analysis — The Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) Center for Program Analysis (OCPA) addresses high priority, cross-program policy issues within OSWER. Through its activities, OCPA enhances OSWER's ability to measure and evaluate progress in its cleanup programs, analyze non-regulatory benefits, and conduct analyses to help align OSWER with Agency-wide priorities and policies.