Talk:Superfund

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Proposed move to Superfund

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was move. —Nightstallion (?) 11:00, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose the move. "Superfund" may be unambiguous within the US environmental community, but for the general WP readership it is just a general term. Besides it is not the official name of the program, and there is at least one other "Superfund": see "Superfund (disambiguation)". In fact, Superfund should be (or redirect to) the disamb article. Jorge Stolfi 15:11, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
• Support. From Google:
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 444 for "Superfund Investment Group"
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 330,000 for +Superfund +Austria -epa -environment.
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 6,720,000 for +Superfund +EPA.
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 5,640,000 for +Superfund +environment.
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 3,980,000 for +Superfund +toxic.
  • —Joseph/N328KF (Talk) 16:02, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
• Support The EPA use is overwhelmingly the most common. older ≠ wiser 02:24, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

List of superfunds

Should we set up a list of Superfund sites, with information about each one? Chadlupkes 04:58, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with that, though it should definetly be in a seperate page (with a link to it from here, and a small paragraph describing it, of course). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.194.72.243 (talk • contribs) 12:23, April 24, 2006

Well, there are over a thousand of of them, and looking at the list, many of them aren't really noteworthy (example: ENVIROCHEM CORP. ZIONSVILLE, IN). I think a category for existing sites would be appropriate. A full list would be silly. A list of noteworthy Superfund sites, including major sucesses should be included on this page. Cacophony 05:59, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

What about the first sites? Weren't there five? MMetro (talk) 01:53, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

There are at least five, or more, sites listed in the List of Superfund sites whose articles make no mention whatsoever of any contamination of the site; or in fact even their Superfund status. Most of these are airports or former and current military bases. This has the effect of making the individual articles seem like propaganda. Why are government-owned facilities the ones 'protected' in this way? Even if the nature of the contamination is unknown, if the list is accurate it would seem the bare minimum requirement for basic honesty would be to have ANY Superfund site's article make some metion of its status as a Superfund site. If the list itself is inaccurate, this should be corrected. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.190.163.70 (talk) 17:34, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Merge back

Should the List of Superfund sites in the United States be merged into the Implementation section of this site? It seems that the list may be a content fork, and it only directs people to the individual state sites. See this peer review for more info. Cmcnicoll (talk) 00:05, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Another option is merging the U.S. list into National Priorities List, which may make more sense if the state lists only have NPL sites. However, the state lists also contain Superfund Alternative sites and other Superfund sites that are addressed through CERCLA, but are not on the NPL. Cmcnicoll (talk) 00:48, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Citation

The citation to the comment, "Congress provided the oil industry an exemption of liability for the cleanup of petroleum in return for a fee on petroleum products to fund cleanups of other toxic substances.[3]" does not provide any support any support for the assertion of this statement. I hope there will be no objection in removing the sentence until a suitable citation can be found. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slade1411 (talk • contribs) 23:34, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Map request

It would be interesting to have the sites plotted onto a national map, even if there is not a list of all 1000+ in the encyclopedia. (That can be left to external sites.) -- Beland 19:30, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

If anyone wants to take this on, the data needed is freely available at http://www.nationalatlas.gov/. Kmusser 19:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

I've added a map of all current, proposed and deleted sites in the contiguous 48 states. --skew-t (talk) 09:31, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Clarification

Are the sites that are "delisted" cleaned up, or just removed? -- Beland 19:30, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Deleted means that they have determined no further action is required. See [1]. --skew-t (talk) 09:37, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

The introduction claims 1240 sites. The Last line of the entry states over 1300. Does anyone know which is correct? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Armenite (talk • contribs)

POV Check

I've added this tag based on the statements with regard to the Regan administration and Rita being described only as a former employee of a company that produced toxic waste, as well as the later statements regarding Clinton reforms: supported as better by who? Blocked by Republicans relevant?

I went with the Check tag only as some of this may just need a little clean up - e.g. Rita even ended up charged over her actions while at the EPA. I don't have the expertise to sort all of this out (I'm not even American) but partisan shots take away from the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.205.213.254 (talk) 19:04, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Statements with regard to the Reagan administration and Rita are simply fact, certainly not "partisan shots." The statement concerning who supported the Clinton reforms has been added. That these reforms were blocked is certainly relevant and again, it's only fact to say who blocked them. The article is not the place to go into the reasons why, which may or may not have been persuasive. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Speonjosh (talk • contribs) 20:54, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but, stuff like this especially needs to be referenced (and in an encyclopedic tone). I'm did some cleanup & removed the POV tag -- Lateg (talk) 14:26, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Merge December 2010

Agradman created a bunch of articles (Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation, Source control action, Superfund reportable quantity, Section 106 order, Orphan share, Section 104(e) letter, Remedial action plan, Remedial response, Nonbinding allocation of responsibility, Hazard Ranking System, CERCLIS) that are basically definitions of terms relevant to the Superfund process. I think these should be made into redirects, and the content merged into the Superfund article. Cmcnicoll (talk) 21:06, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

• Support. They are definitions that do not justify a standalone article. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 21:30, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

• Support. Agreed - they do not justify standalone articles but further explanation would be a great resource for understanding more about this topic.

IUrangerb (talk) 05:20, 9 February 2011 (UTC)IUrangerb

History of the name?

So where did the name "Superfund" come from? (That's what I came here to find out, therefore it should be in the article! Probably.)- David Gerard (talk) 18:49, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

A helpful anon has answered on my talk page! "My understanding is that the funding collected under Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) was deemed the "superfund" because the idea was that these new funds would pay for environmental clean up in situations where no responsible party could be found to do the clean up. "Superfund to the rescue," if you will. For example, perhaps an abandoned land fill with lots of industrial waste from many sources, no operator to be found, and maybe all the records destroyed. At the time of the initial legislation, most stake holders thought that Superfund paid clean ups would be the norm. In practice, three decades later, many (most?) clean ups are actually paid for by "responsible" parties. I would imagine EPA's history office would have some source material documenting this. This is a personal opinion, not necessarily the opinion of my employer, USEPA." So all we need now is a citable source ... - David Gerard (talk) 15:16, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Requested move 2013

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Not moved as per Wikipedia naming policy at WP:NAMING. Users confused about whether Superfund is a government law/program or a superhero would do well to read the very first sentence of the article. (non-admin closure) Red Slash 16:54, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

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Superfund → ? – "Superfund"? Really? When is this ever precise? (end of rant) I don't think this title reflects the current article content that describe the bill, officially called "Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980". I would like to vote for Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act" or CERCLA, but I'm torn. Nevertheless, I would assume that "Superfund" be a parody of Superman. Also, this title was used as an example for "Obamacare" rename request. WP:NC-GAL doesn't say much about names of legislations except commonality of any name, so I'll leave suggestions to you. George Ho (talk) 05:57, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

• EPA Superfund ? -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 06:11, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
• Basically oppose (although I don't object to EPA Superfund): I've never heard of CERCLA or its unabbreviated equivalent. I've heard of the EPA's Superfund (and the "Superfund sites" that it works to clean up) many times. The nominator has no specific suggested alternative for "Superfund". I don't think this article has some of the problems that arise from the "Obamacare" suggestion. "Superfund" seems to refer to a specific well-known fund and closely associated activities, and that term seems to be used approximately universally (AFAIK). —BarrelProof (talk) 11:00, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
• Support Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, per WP:NC-GAL. "Superfund" suffers from WP:POV and WP:BIAS. CERCLA is out by WP:ACRONYMTITLE. ENeville (talk) 17:41, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose any title that doesn't include "Superfund", which is the common and well-known name. "Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act" is obscure. I've no objection to modifying as "US EPA Superfund" or something similar. older ≠ wiser 19:03, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose WP:NC-GAL, in fact, says to prefer the most common name of legislation. I don't know what Superman has to do with any of this. How often is legislation nicknamed as a parody of a superhero? Besides, of course, the august Juggernaut Bitch Act. --BDD (talk) 16:56, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 2 August 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Not moved, opposes not countered (non-admin closure) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:22, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

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Superfund → Superfund Act of 1980 – While "Superfund" clearly is the common name of the federal trust that was created and subsequently managed under the provision of this act, a "Superfund" is a fund and not an act. I'm reading the word "superfund" in the legal text as a keyword rather than a proper shortname, and quite some reliable sources agree with my notion, referring to CERCLA as the "Superfund Act". Following several later amendments and a number of, often eponymous, state laws, the act however isn't anymore unambiguously described without adding the year.
Note that I'm absolutely in favor of having a separate article on the genesis and history of the "Superfund" since its 1980 inception, that could perfectly be titled "Superfund" without any disambiguator. Until then, Superfund may even redirect here, as long as the article is correctly named. -- PanchoS (talk) 04:15, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. The article "Superfund" is about the general topic of Superfund, which naturally includes a lot of detail on the legislative act, so the article seems "correctly named" enough as is. It would be fine to split off articles away from this if length becomes a concern - which it doesn't appear to be yet. So if anything, I'd say the reverse - if you want to create a Superfund Act of 1980 split article, or a "Superfund legislation" article that closely tracks the original law + amendments, great! But there definitely needs to be an "overview" article about the entire topic, and that is probably best named "Superfund", not about the specific legislation (which would seem to exclude most of the article as written...) SnowFire (talk) 22:32, 2 August 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. I expanded the lead section (which has been tagged as too short) to make clear that the article is about the entire program rather than just the act. As SnowFire said, it is theoretically possible to split the article after expansion, but at this stage it is reasonably covers most aspects of the program, so it naturally lends itself as the overview article. No such user (talk) 07:02, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

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Ex post facto#United States?

Since polluters can be required to fund remediation of pollution events that occurred before CERCLA was passed, does it count as a retroactive law as laid out in that article? I realise that would not be unconstitutional where only civil violations occurred, but anyway if so, it should be mentioned in both articles. Arlo James Barnes 03:15, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Re-title to CERCLA

Hi. I'm going to pull this lever again, it's my first time on this page and I was surprised to be directed here when I searched for CERCLA. Superfund should be re-titled to CERCLA and Superfund be a re-direct to CERCLA. Superfund is part of an amendment (1986) to CERCLA, not in the OG 1980 act, and despite the public's limited understanding that if it is superfund it must be serious, it's disingenuous to not correct the public's understanding of CERCLA. Superfund is a small part of CERCLA and implies funding, and there's a whole lot to understand about it. I won't go into the implications of this limited understanding when applying CERCLA on the ground. Let's educate the public rather than keep them in a tunnel of limited understanding. (this is my first time using Talk, apologies if I've missed anything) WesternYew (talk) 15:38, 24 July 2021 (UTC)WesternYew