When Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA or the Superfund),¹ it "intended that those responsible for problems caused by the disposal of chemical poisons bear the costs and responsibility for remedying the harmful conditions they created."² Unfortunately, the combination of remedial costs, which greatly exceed available funding,³ and CERCLA's imprecise language, which is susceptible to broad interpretation,⁴ have allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose remedial costs on those who did not contribute to the contamination.

Under CERCLA §107, owners of property are absolutely liable for remediating their property, regardless of whether they are responsible for its contamination.⁵ Similarly, lessees have been held liable, irrespective of any contribution to contamination of the property, through the tortured reasoning that the unavailability of the third-party defense to lessees⁶ creates an inverse inference of liability for lessees.⁷ And recently, a lender that had the capacity to control waste-handling activities was found liable under a similarly expansive interpretation, notwithstanding that the lender was not the operator of the site, did not influence waste-handling decisions, and was otherwise not negligent.⁸