In a move that marks the government’s crack down on polluters, forcing them to pay up for cleaning, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this week added as many as ten waste-disposal sites – including Chicago’s 87-acre Lake Calumet Cluster, and the former Chemetco smelter in Madison County near St. Louis - to its Superfund National Priorities List.

The new listing of the cluster of waste disposal sites on the Superfund – a federal program looking into and cleaning up the country’s ‘uncontrolled’ perilous waste sites - will enable the EPA not only to carry on its investigation into the extent of contamination, but also to identify the best possible manner in which the contamination should be effectively dealt with.

While the Lake Calumet Cluster, surrounded by wetlands, landfills and railroad tracks, was earlier a dumping ground for industrial and chemical wastes, and its contaminants include arsenic, cyanide and benzene; the Chemetco site was a secondary copper smelter, with hazardous waste like heavy metals copper, lead and cadmium dumped into a tributary of the Mississippi River.

Calling the extent of contamination at the two newly-listed sites an environmental “horror” which can ecologically be “very harmful,” Maggie Carson, spokeswoman for Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, said that the some such waste disposal sites have essentially been “an issue for decades” and necessitate a cleanup at the earliest.