Race and Superfund site remediation

Abstract

Superfund is a federal program established in 1980 to manage the cleanup of hazardous waste sites across the United States. Given the health and economic costs borne by people living near these sites, any demographic disparities within the Superfund program are issues of environmental justice. We investigate whether racial demographics local to a Superfund site are associated with its cleanup status, and if so, how. Our work addresses gaps in the literature by using detailed geospatial processing, comprehensive data, and a more complete set of racial/ethnic categorizations. We study 1,688 Superfund sites across the country. Under a wide variety of modeling scenarios, we consistently find that the proportion of the nearby population that is Asian is negatively associated with the probability of a Superfund site being cleaned up. This association has remained unidentified until now, possibly because earlier research on Superfund sites did not distinguish Asian populations as a separate group. Our result underscores the need for specific measurement and inclusion of diverse populations in environmental studies.