Superfund Site Cleanup Creates Jobs
Love Canal, Valley of The Barrels, and Camp Pendleton all sound like normal enough places and maybe even a little romantic, but don't let the names fool you, these places are or were some of the most toxic areas in the whole U.S. These toxic dumps represent a federally controlled site called a superfund site and there are currently about 1,280 of these superfund sites in the United States. What might interest you the most though is these superfund sites and their proceeding cleanup might be the economic booster and job creation tool that the United States has been looking for.
It seems that these superfund sites could have been a blessing in disguise for a long time in the making. The official name for the congressional act that created superfund sites and their cleanup is called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. While not the catchiest name in the world, it did set a precedent and a procedure for cleaning up areas of high toxicity. Were the bill came up short is that by the mid to late 1980's, little time and resources were being committed to cleanup. The result was a build up of sites that weren't being cleaned up or remediated and would continue to just sit there and sometimes allow their toxic chemicals to leach into surrounding areas and water tables for many years to come.
What makes this build up of superfund sites important is that in 2009, President Obama passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which guaranteed plenty of money to restart and accelerate these superfund cleanup projects among other things. This makes for an almost perfect equation for job creation and helping save the environment. You have a large surplus of superfund sites that have been needing to be cleaned up for decades now, you have an almost 9.4% unemployment rate as of December 2010, and you have a huge paradigm shift that is making anything environmental related at the top of the priority lists which can only equal a clean environment and potentially thousands of jobs created.
The only potential downside in the long run is that these are not jobs that could potentially last forever. It is important to realize that while yes, there will almost certainly be some superfund sites to clean up, if the U.S. employs a large enough work force like it wants to then we could potentially reconcile almost all of these built up superfund sites in under 30 years, let alone some of these sites could be cleaned up in a matter of months or just a couple of years. However, while these jobs might not be sustainable for more than a few years, this could be the economic stimulus that the U.S. needs to get people back to work and to get the economy jump started again to create even more jobs to displace the workers that will be finishing up their contracts to clean up these sites.
Green Job Articles
Do It Yourself
