Environmental Justice and the Remediation of Contaminated Land

Abstract

Land contamination has been a major issue in the U.S. for over three decades. The focus on environmental justice (EJ), meanwhile, is more recent. While numerous studies have analyzed EJ concerns in the context of contaminated land, they have been limited in their scope because of their focus on specific cases and regions over short time frames. In this paper, using census data for two decades (1980 and 2000), we study the potential EJ conflicts in the National Priority List (NPL)’s siting, hazardous rank scoring and remediation, and provide the most comprehensive analysis of EJ in the context of contaminated land in the United States. We conduct the analysis for three different measurements of an EJ community: communities defined by a Census Tract, and within 2-mile and 3-mile radii of NPL sites. In doing so, we also test the sensitivity of the EJ results to units of analysis. Among many of our findings, we document a strong regional dimension to EJ concerns in the NPL siting and remediation and show that the EJ conclusions are not robust to alternative conceptualizations of EJ communities.