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Environmental Effects
At Pepe Field in Boonton, NJ, Little Leaguers shag fly balls where underground waste once polluted soil and ground water.
The Superfund Program has overseen the cleanup of over a thousand contaminated properties across the country. While the Agency's primary objective is to protect human health and the environment, cleaning up sites has, in many cases, also generated beneficial reuse opportunities and impacts. Superfund Redevelopment has undertaken the following activities to measure and report on a range of accomplishments and outcomes realized through cleaning up and redeveloping formerly contaminated sites, including:
Documenting and Reporting Reuse Accomplishments at Superfund and Federal Facility sites
Additional information on documenting when sites are ready for reuse on a sitewide basis can be found in "Guidance for Documenting and Reporting the Superfund Sitewide Ready-for-Reuse Performance Measure" (PDF) (6 pp, 72K, About PDF)
Additional information on these indicators and measures can be found in EPA's Cross Program Revitalization Guidance (PDF) (56 pp, 250K, About PDF).
Measuring the Local Economic Impacts of Site Redevelopment
EPA places a high priority on land revitalization as an integral part of its Superfund cleanup program mission. Agency policies have increasingly addressed the issue of making Superfund NPL sites protective for current and future users. Reuse of formerly contaminated land was first highlighted in EPA's 2003 Strategic Plan and reaffirmed in EPA's 2006 Strategic Plan (PDF) (184 pp, 9.6MB, About PDF). In addition, OSWER cleanup programs have been collecting anecdotal reuse-related information for over 10 years, seen for example, in the Superfund Redevelopment success stories.
As a means of more consistently summarizing land revitalization impacts and outcomes, EPA has developed a set of performance measures for Superfund and that reach across cleanup programs to allow these programs to systematically collect and communicate information about their reuse accomplishments. Superfund, in coordination with the Federal Facilities Restoration and Reuse Office (FFRRO), has developed a new performance measure to report the Superfund program's accomplishments in making land ready for reuse at construction complete sites.
In addition, Superfund and FFRRO are working together to implement new performance measures that identify acres of relevant sites that are protective for people under current conditions and ready for their anticipated use.
EPA analysis has demonstrated how productive reuse of formerly contaminated properties can have significant positive economic, environmental, and social impacts on local communities.