Under CERCLA, the burden to clean up polluted sites falls on current owners and potentially polluters.

• A. True
• B. False
• C. Only government-owned land
• D. Only for brownfield sites

Answer: (A)

CERCLA assigns the cleanup responsibility to those connected with the pollution, reflecting a polluter pays approach. The law makes current owners, operators, and other potentially responsible parties (such as former owners, generators of hazardous waste, transporters, and arrangers) liable for the costs of cleaning up contaminated sites. In practice, EPA can pursue cost recovery and cleanup from these parties, and if no viable parties can be found, cleanup can proceed with federal funds from the Superfund program, with later opportunities to recover those costs from PRPs. There are defenses, like the innocent landowner protections, but the default expectation is that those tied to the contamination bear the burden. So the statement is correct.