There are roughly 26,000 known contaminated sites in Michigan. A new state-funded report says weak oversight on polluters is costing future generations both financially and socially.
Institutional controls are ways to limit the impacts of pollution without actively cleaning up a site — like switching residents on polluted wells to municipal water or implementing deed/ordinance restrictions on contaminated property uses.
According to the state's environmental department, more than 3,500 sites employ institutional controls.
The report found that polluters underestimate the long-term costs of these control methods. But it's still cheaper for polluters to implement band-aid fixes on contaminated sites.
"We kind of view that as a market failure, and that actions are needed to try and make that not as easy an economic choice for the responsible party," said Glenn O'Neil, the report's co-author with the Michigan State University Institute of Water Research.
The analysis was put together by a team from MSU and the nonprofit For the Love of Water. After whittling down 30 potential contaminated sites, researchers calculated the "transactional costs" of continuing to fund institutional controls at seven sites across the state. The site selection was meant to reflect some variety in geography, scope and exposures.
O'Neil said the true costs are likely much higher, given that the report did not attempt to quantify the long-term community health impacts and the "erosion of public trust."
"These problems don't fix themselves," O'Neil said. "If we put this off down the road for future generations to have to deal with ... or to attenuate, then it's just a burden that we're placing on our children, our grandchildren."
The report recommends requiring polluters to better document contamination and pay fees for delaying cleanups. Previous attempts to pass stronger polluter pay laws in the statehouse have died in committees.
"It's not an anti-institutional controls report. They serve an important function. I mean, we need to prevent exposures to contaminated groundwater and soil," O'Neil said. "(ICs) are an important part of an environmental remediation toolkit, but we can't just rely on them alone."
