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Abstract:
Under the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Superfund program, the parties responsible for hazardous waste sites that are contaminating the environment are liable for the costs of cleaning up the sites. Responsible parties can include generators of hazardous waste deposited at the sites, transporters of the waste, and site owners and operators. In addition to paying for cleanup expenses, responsible parties also incur legal costs to allocate the cleanup expenses among themselves, to settle with the government, or to litigate liability for cleanups. Responsible parties have complained that the costs of these activities-called transaction costs-are high and represent too large a portion of their total Superfund expenditures. However, limited data have been collected on these transaction costs. To help fill this gap, you asked us to survey the Fortune 500 Industrial and Fortune 500 Service corporations' to determine how much responsible parties have spent for cleanup and legal costs at Superfund sites and to identify the factors that these parties believe have increased and decreased their legal costs. Approximately two-thirds of these 1, 000 corporations responded to our survey, and about half of the respondents said that they had been involved at Superfund sites. (See app. I for a detailed discussion of our objectives, scope, and methodology.)
| Limitations: |
 APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE |
| Pages: |
62 |
| Report Date: |
DEC 94 |
| Report Number: |
A555692 |
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