Communities in 55 state or local governments will receive $55 million in supplemental funding for brownfields revolving loan fund grants to help communities carry out cleanup activities, redevelopment projects, and create jobs for local residents living near brownfields sites. The grants include $42 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that President Obama signed into law on February 17, 2009, and $13 million from the EPA brownfields general program funding. Fourteen communities in eight states will share $6.8 million in Brownfields Job Training Grants geared toward cleaning up contaminated properties and turning them into productive community assets. These grants are funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under its Brownfields Program is awarding grants of up to $500,000 each to eligible governmental entities and non-profit organizations.

This Directive provides a compilation of some key existing EPA groundwater policies to assist EPA Regions in making groundwater restoration decisions pursuant to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and the National Contingency Plan (NCP).

This issue of Technology News and Trends provides selected updates on pilot projects and treatability studies described in past issues. Some technologies moved toward full-scale application at the study sites, while others were supplemented or replaced by one or more technologies, such as injections of vegetable oil or sodium lactate, soil mixing with zero valent iron, air sparging, and mulch reactive barriers.

To assess the potential for risk from contaminated sediments and to help determine contamination levels for remedial designs, EPA's Land Research Program has developed several ecological risk assessment tools including: 1) Biota-Sediment Accumulation Factor Data Set, which can be used to evaluate the transfer of chemicals from sediments into the aquatic food chain; 2) PCB Residue Effects (PCBRes) Database, an abundance of information for risk assessors to use for correlating polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other dioxin-like compound residues with toxic effects and developing Toxicity Reference Values (TRVs); and 3) ECOTOX Database, for use when risk assessors and managers need to develop TRVs for sediment sites that have contaminants other than, or in addition to, PCBs and dioxins and provides ready access to single-chemical toxicity information for aquatic and terrestrial life. Each of these tools facilitate a scientifically defensible risk assessment, improve the decision-making ability of risk managers at Superfund and other contaminated sites, and facilitate successful remediation efforts.

A little over a year ago, over 260 individuals gathered from the U.S. and abroad at UMass-Amherst in Massachusetts to discuss the use of the Triad Approach to conduct investigations and remedial actions faster, better, and at a reduced cost. The Triad Community of Practice (CoP) will redeliver updates of several of the same sessions to benefit the greater CLU-IN audience that either may not have been able to attend the conference, or were not able to attend a specific presentation while at the conference. By doing this, the Triad CoP hopes participants can learn more about some of the Triad tools and how they have been applied by the environmental industry.