A top EPA waste official says the agency should be breaking down the National Priority List (NPL) of Superfund sites based on site-specific factors, such as the type of contamination involved, in order to develop better cleanup strategies, as one way to "evolve" the program based on advice from the just-concluded Superfund Task Force. "We need to quit thinking of the National Priorities List as just a single list. We need to break it up ... Landfill sites are different from radioactive contamination sites. Some sites can't be cleaned up very quickly, while others are going to have a faster timeframe. So we need to be subdividing the list putting them in more logical groupings, and then do our deep data dive," Steven Cook, EPA's deputy waste chief, told a Sept. 12 Superfund panel at the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Environment, Energy & Resources fall conference here.
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