“The federal mandate going all the way back to those early days in the legislation said that you needed to conduct all appropriate inquiries consistent with good ‘commercial and customary practice,’” says Kilgore. The standard also has specific application for lenders, investors, developers, insurers, brownfield grantees, municipalities, and others, becoming one of ASTM’s most impactful and well-known standards. “The way the cost recovery in the legislation is laid out, it allows EPA to recover response costs not necessarily based on the contributions of what a party has done, but merely because they were the ones with the most money.”Į1527 was created to provide a proven process that buyers of commercial real estate could follow for liability protection from environmental response costs. in Salt Lake City, Utah, and technical lead of the E1527 task group.

“Back in the early days, there was a lot of litigation around Superfund sites and the broad net that EPA had set up to recapture response costs on these abandoned contaminated sites,” explains Julie Kilgore, president of Wasatch Environmental, Inc. Enter ASTM’s standard practice for environmental site assessments: Phase I environmental site assessment process ( E1527).įirst published by the committee on environmental assessment, risk management and corrective action ( E50) in 1993, key revisions to this critical standard have recently been completed for the first time since 2013. However, there was confusion and uncertainty as to what needed to be done during commercial property transactions to avoid potentially onerous CERCLA liability related to EPA’s response costs. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) across the country, with about 1,600 of the most highly contaminated listed on the National Priorities List.įOR YOU: 6 Standards Making a Difference for the EnvironmentĬERCLA’s stated goal is to both protect human health by cleaning up toxic contamination while also returning as many of these sites as possible to productive use.

Today, there are more than 40,000 Superfund sites managed by the U.S.

as well as a trust fund to pay for those efforts, funded through taxes on certain polluting industries. It created both a program to clean up toxic waste sites in the U.S. The result was the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA, more commonly known as the federal Superfund law). That left the government to address the health risks created by such sites. Hazardous waste incidents such as Love Canal in New York had sparked a national outcry over the state of America’s lands and waters, but too often the parties responsible for the damage were out of the picture, either bankrupt or otherwise unable to fix the problem. The 1970s were a transformational time in terms of U.S.

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