Somewhere near you — closer than you think — there is almost certainly a place where the ground itself is poisoned. A shuttered factory. An abandoned military base. A former dry cleaner. A defunct chemical plant. A closed landfill that accepted things it should not have. These places have a name in federal law: Superfund sites. And the United States government maintains a map of every single one of them.
Most Americans have never looked at it. Most Americans do not know it exists. And that ignorance has real consequences — for health, for property values, and for the fundamental question of who gets to live in a safe environment.
What a Superfund Site Actually Is
The Superfund program was born from catastrophe. In the late 1970s, residents of a neighborhood called Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, began reporting alarming rates of illness. Children were sick. Birth defects were unusually common. The ground in their yards oozed with chemical waste. It turned out that the Hooker Chemical Company had dumped over 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals into an abandoned canal between 1942 and 1953 — and then the city built homes and a school on top of it.
The public outcry was enormous. In 1978, President Carter declared a federal emergency. Hundreds of families were evacuated. And in 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — CERCLA — creating what we now call the Superfund program. The law gave the EPA authority to identify contaminated sites, force responsible parties to clean them up, and use a federal trust fund to pay for cleanups when no responsible party could be found or compelled.
Love Canal was the first site placed on the National Priorities List. It was not deleted from that list until 2004, twenty-seven years later.
The Numbers Today
As of March 2026, there are 1,343 active sites on the EPA's National Priorities List. These are the worst of the worst — sites where contamination is serious enough to warrant federal attention and long-term remediation. But the NPL is just the tip of a much larger problem. The EPA's Superfund Enterprise Management System tracks tens of thousands of additional contaminated sites across the country, many of which never made the priority list but still pose risks to nearby communities.
The human geography of these sites is staggering. According to EPA population estimates, approximately 23 to 24 million Americans — roughly seven percent of the population — live within one mile of an NPL Superfund site. Expand that radius to three miles, and the number jumps to approximately 78 million people, nearly a quarter of the country. These are not remote industrial wastelands. They are neighborhoods. They are places where people raise children, plant gardens, and drink water from local sources.
And the demographics of who lives near these sites are not random.
The Environmental Justice Dimension
Superfund sites are disproportionately located near communities of color and low-income populations. The data on this point is unambiguous. According to EPA analyses, approximately nine percent of all minority Americans live within one mile of an NPL Superfund site, compared to seven percent of the general population. At the three-mile radius, twenty-eight to twenty-nine percent of minorities live near a site. Black Americans are seventy-five percent more likely to live near waste-producing facilities than the general population.
Low-income communities bear a similar burden. About eight percent of all households below the poverty line are within one mile of an NPL site, and twenty-five to twenty-six percent are within three miles. Linguistically isolated communities — households where no one over fourteen speaks English fluently — are even more concentrated near these sites, with ten to eleven percent within one mile.
This is not coincidence. It is the accumulated result of decades of zoning decisions, housing policy, and industrial siting that placed the most dangerous facilities in the neighborhoods with the least political power. The communities that bear the greatest environmental risk are often the communities least equipped to navigate the bureaucratic systems designed to address it.
The Map That Exists — and Nobody Uses
The EPA maintains a free, publicly accessible tool called "Cleanups in My Community." You can find it at the EPA's website. Enter a ZIP code, a city, or an address, and it will show you every Superfund site — along with sites from other cleanup programs — on an interactive map. You can click on individual sites to see their status, their contamination history, and the progress of cleanup efforts.
A separate tool, the "Superfund National Priorities List Where You Live Map," lets you browse NPL sites by state, county, or city. The EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online database — ECHO, at echo.epa.gov — provides inspection reports, violation histories, and enforcement actions for individual facilities.
These tools are comprehensive. They are free. They are updated regularly. And they are used by almost no one outside of environmental professionals, real estate attorneys, and journalists. The average homeowner has never searched their address. The average parent has never checked whether their child's school sits within a mile of a contaminated site. The average voter has never looked at the cleanup status of the site their tax dollars are funding.
This is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of awareness. And the consequences are measured in health outcomes, property values, and community trust.
What Contamination Does to Communities
The health effects of living near a Superfund site are well documented. Studies have linked proximity to NPL sites with elevated rates of cancer, chronic respiratory illness, developmental disabilities, and birth defects. Research from the University of Texas has found that living near a contaminated site can reduce life expectancy by as much as 1.2 years. Pregnant women living near uncleaned Superfund sites face a twenty to twenty-five percent higher risk of having a child with congenital birth defects.
Children are particularly vulnerable. They breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults. They ingest more water and food relative to their size. They put their hands in their mouths. A contaminated playground, a toxic groundwater plume feeding a residential well, a vacant lot where chemicals were dumped decades ago — these are not abstract risks for a child. They are daily exposures.
The economic effects are equally concrete. Research consistently shows that proximity to a Superfund site reduces property values by roughly eight percent on average, with the effect intensifying the closer a property sits to the contamination. For a home worth three hundred thousand dollars, that is a twenty-four thousand dollar loss — invisible until the homeowner tries to sell and discovers that the disclosure requirements include mentioning the contaminated site down the road. Some states, like Maryland, have enacted or proposed legislation requiring real estate sellers to disclose when a property sits within a half mile or a mile of an NPL site. Most states have not.
Cleanup can reverse some of this damage. Studies show that remediation and delisting of a Superfund site can increase nearby property values by five to twenty-four percent, depending on the home's value and location. But cleanup takes time. Enormous amounts of time.
The Pace of Cleanup
The average cost of remediating a single Superfund site is approximately $27 million. Total estimated costs to clean up all current and anticipated NPL sites range from $60 billion to over $150 billion, depending on the methodology and assumptions. The EPA obligated over $1.3 billion for construction and post-construction cleanup projects in fiscal year 2024 alone — a significant figure, but still a fraction of the total need.
The timelines are sobering. In the program's early years, nonfederal cleanup projects were completed in an average of 3.9 years after NPL listing. By the mid-1990s, that average had grown to 10.6 years. Many sites listed in the 1980s and 1990s remain in active remediation today. Woburn, Massachusetts — the contaminated community whose story was told in the book and film "A Civil Action" — was added to the NPL in 1982. Its groundwater was not expected to be safe until at least 2020. The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, declared a Superfund site in 2010, continues to face cost overruns and scheduling delays.
In 2019, the backlog of unfunded Superfund cleanup projects reached thirty-four sites — the highest level in at least fifteen years. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021 injected $3.5 billion into the program and reauthorized an excise tax on chemical manufacturers, generating $1.44 billion in fiscal year 2023. That investment was significant and necessary. But the scope of the problem dwarfs even these figures. There are sites on the National Priorities List that have been there for more than forty years.
What This Looks Like in Georgia
Georgia is home to its own share of Superfund sites, and they illustrate the range of contamination the program addresses. In Brunswick, the LCP Chemicals site spans 813 acres of tidal marshland, contaminated by industrial operations dating back to the 1920s — an oil refinery, a paint manufacturer, a chlor-alkali plant. Near Macon, the Robins Air Force Base site has groundwater and soil contaminated with volatile organic compounds from decades of disposing of industrial solvents and oils in unlined waste pits. In Fort Valley, the Woolfolk Chemical Works produced pesticides for over sixty years, leaving behind a cocktail of toxaphene, benzene, arsenic, chromium, and lead in the soil and groundwater near homes and businesses.
In Atlanta, the Westside Lead site is a residential area where soil testing found elevated lead levels — a legacy of nineteenth-century ammunition manufacturers and foundries whose slag and metal waste was used as fill material. People built homes on it. Children played in yards made of it.
These are not distant problems. They are Georgia problems. They are community problems. And the first step to addressing them is knowing they exist.
How to Use the Tools
We encourage every reader to spend ten minutes doing what almost no one does: search your address.
Step one: Go to the EPA's "Cleanups in My Community" page. Enter your ZIP code or street address. Review the map for any sites within a few miles of where you live, work, or send your children to school.
Step two: If you find a site, click on it. Read the site profile. What are the contaminants? What is the cleanup status? Is the site in active remediation, long-term monitoring, or has it been proposed for deletion?
Step three: Visit the ECHO database at echo.epa.gov. Search for the site by name. Look at the inspection history, the violation record, and any enforcement actions. This will tell you whether the site is being managed responsibly or whether the cleanup has stalled.
Step four: Check your state's environmental agency. In Georgia, the Environmental Protection Division maintains records on state-managed cleanup sites that may not appear on the federal NPL. Many states have their own databases and mapping tools.
Step five: If you are buying a home, do this search before you sign anything. Real estate disclosure laws vary widely by state, and many do not require sellers to proactively inform buyers about nearby contamination. The responsibility for due diligence often falls on the buyer — and the tools to conduct that diligence are free.
Why This Matters
The Superfund program exists because the consequences of ignoring contamination are catastrophic. Love Canal proved that. Woburn proved that. Hundreds of communities across the country continue to prove it every day. But the program depends on something that no federal law can mandate: public attention.
State environmental agencies are chronically underfunded. The EPA's enforcement capacity has been stretched thin for years. Responsible parties — the companies that caused the contamination — have every incentive to delay, minimize, and litigate. The single most powerful check on all of this is an informed public that knows what is in the ground, knows what the law requires, and shows up when the decisions are being made.
The map exists. The data is public. The question is whether anyone is looking at it.
We think they should be.
The EPR Foundation publishes educational resources on environmental contamination, public health, and community engagement at eprfoundation.org. Search your address using the EPA's free tools — and share what you find with your neighbors.