Mother Nature Network

The U.S. Superfund program was created in 1980 to clean up the country’s most toxic places. It gave the EPA unprecedented authority to identify the corporations or other parties responsible for the hazardous conditions they create, and force them to clean up their messes on their own dime.

Today, more than 1,300 sites are on the program’s national priorities list. One might even exist in your own neighborhood, since about 11 million Americans live within one mile of a Superfund site.

10 Superfund sites: Where are they now