Years of unregulated dumping of chemical wastes have led to the creation of numerous hazardous waste sites around the country. Increased awareness of and concern about the public health and environmental risks posed by these sites led Congress to establish the Superfund program in 1980 to locate, investigate, and clean up the worst sites nationwide. The Superfund program is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in cooperation with state and tribal governments. To learn more about the Superfund program, visit the EPA’s Superfund website (http://www.epa.gov/superfund/about.htm)

Oregon and Washington are located in EPA’s Region 10: Pacific Northwest. Oregon has eleven designated Superfund sites, while Washington has 47 designated sites. Visit EPA’s Superfund site for Region 10 (http://yosemite.epa.gov/r10/cleanup.nsf/webpage/Superfund+(CERCLA)).

The Superfund Basic Research Program (SBRP) was established by the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) of 1986. The SBRP is a university-based program of basic research housed within the National Institute of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. Research sponsored by the program complements the activities of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The primary goals of the SBRP are to:

A unique feature of the SBRP is that it fosters an interdisciplinary approach to address the problems at hazardous waste sites. The program was designed to encourage collaborations among academic scientists across a number of fields—ecology, epidemiology, toxicology, chemistry, geology, and engineering. For this reason, the program funds interdisciplinary projects that draw on the expertise of researchers from different scientific specialties. Currently, the SBRP supports peer-reviewed research in 19 university programs encompassing 70 collaborating institutions

More information about the SBRP and its participating university programs can be found at the NIEHS SBRP web site.