TWENTY-FIVE MILES OR SO OUTSIDE OF St. Louis, Missouri, lies little Herculaneum, a town of only 3,500 people. Looming over the town’s economy and the local environment is the Doe Run Company’s lead smelter, which dates back to 1892 and is the largest in the United States. For decades, federal and state regulators have been after the company for polluting. In 1991, they required Doe Run to replace the contaminated topsoil in the gardens of about ninety houses in the vicinity of its smelter. In 2001, a study found that 24 percent of the children under six living within a mile of the company’s plant had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood.

As a result, Doe Run agreed to clean up the site and started installing new pollution-control devices to prevent further contamination.
102 In the meantime, however, environmental investigators found lead levels as high as 300,000 parts per million on a road used by the plant’s trucks. Because of the health hazard that lead contamination poses, the state put up signs warning residents of Herculaneum not to let children play outside, and the federal government helped out by advising people to alter their diets to resist lead poisoning (the gist:
Don’t drink tea but eat more liver, eggs, whole-grain bread, and ice cream). Not so surprisingly, many residents of Herculaneum found this sort of assistance insulting. Instead, they urged the federal government to step in, declare Herculaneum a Superfund cleanup site, and use federal funds to buy up the whole town. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), however, maintained that adding Herculaneum to the long list of places seeking a Superfund buyout would only delay a solution.
The EPA is right not to exaggerate the speed with which Superfund projects move. When Congress created Superfund in 1980, sponsors of the legislation believed that the program could mop up the nation’s worst toxic dumps and other dangerously polluted sites within five years and do so for a relatively modest $1.6 billion, to be covered by sales taxes on chemical and petroleum-based products. Superfund was authorized to recover its costs from the polluters themselves and to use this money to pay for future cleanup efforts.
In this way, Superfund would become self-financing, with industry, not the taxpayers, picking....

Discussion Questions 1. Identify the values and describe the attitudes that have contributed to pollution problems like those at Herculaneum. How would you feel if you lived in Herculaneum?
2. Do individuals inside the company, now or in the past, bear responsibility for causing the environmental damage at Herculaneum, or is it only the company as a whole? Is that responsibility shared by anyone outside the company?
Should families who moved to Herculaneum have known better?
3. Who should pay the costs of cleaning up Herculaneum—
the company? The town? The state of Missouri? The federal government? In general, whose responsibility is it to clean up the country’s hazardous pollution sites and waste dumps?
4. Was either the government or Doe Run morally required to buy the contaminated homes?
Should anything else be done for those families?
What, if anything, should be done for the town now?
5. Is Herculaneum better off without the smelter, or should environmental standards have been waived in order to save jobs? Should the company have invested in the technology necessary to bring its lead smelter into compliance with environmental standards?
6. Is it fair for Superfund to fine polluters for dumping or polluting that was legal at the time it occurred? Is it fair that each individual polluter have full liability for cleaning up environmental damage to which others also may have contributed? How might Superfund be made to work better?
7. With regard to pollution in general and the disposal of toxic wastes in particular, what are the obligations of individual manufacturers and of society as a whole to future generations?