- environment
- legal
CERCLA — the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, better known as Superfund — is the federal law for cleaning up releases of hazardous substances. Its defining feature is liability: it imposes strict and retroactive responsibility on the parties connected to a site — joint and several where the harm is indivisible, though a party that proves a divisible share can be apportioned only that much — so cleanup costs can attach to owners and operators long after the contamination occurred.
CERCLA anchors the most serious contamination in the record. A site on the National Priorities List carries a formal cleanup and, for a federal installation, a federal facility agreement setting the schedule. The statute is also expanding — the designation of certain PFAS as hazardous substances pulls those compounds into its liability scheme. Where a contaminated property is being redeveloped rather than listed, it usually appears instead as a brownfield, the lighter-touch cousin of a Superfund cleanup.