Biological Assessment and Ecological Risk Assessment New Tools for Clean-Up Decisions at Hazardous Waste Sites

The goal of EPA’s Superfund program is deceptively straightforward--find the nation’s worst abandoned hazardous wastes sites and clean them up. Achieving this goal in a logical and defensible manner has proven to be a much more difficult task. The initial strategy of the program has emphasized monitoring and testing the toxicity of individual chemicals. However, there has been renewed interest in testing site-specific complex mixtures and organisms. Biological assessment techniques are particularly useful for these purposes and hence have great potential for supporting decisions made at Superfund and other hazardous waste sites.