EPA Stops Letting Polluters Set Cleanup Terms : Environment: Critics say businesses choose cheaper, less permanent remedies. The agency will conduct all Superfund risk assessments itself.

Responding to critics who charge that its policies have favored polluters over public health, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it no longer will allow firms responsible for dumping toxic wastes to assess health risks and the best methods of cleaning them up.

EPA officials now will conduct all risk assessments for sites on the Superfund list of the nation’s most polluted dumps, a senior agency official announced at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing.

Don R. Clay, assistant EPA administrator in charge of the Superfund program, said companies responsible for polluted sites “tend to use less conservative assumptions” than the government in assessing the risks, creating a “public perception” that polluters are downplaying the threats posed by their contamination.

Therefore, he said, “EPA will prepare all risk assessments in the future.”

The risk assessment of a toxic waste site is a critical early step that measures the severity of the public health threat and influences the cost and pace of cleanup efforts.

The policy change is a significant shift away from an approach designed to save the government money by turning over to polluters the authority to direct their own cleanups. In many cases, the firms advocated remedies that were far cheaper and less permanent than those proposed when the EPA itself has evaluated the sites, critics have charged.

Members of Congress, environmental groups and citizens living near the toxic sites have complained that the EPA was abdicating its regulatory role in a misguided effort to save federal money and manpower.

Thursday’s EPA announcement followed a series of articles about the problems of company-led cleanups in The Times this week.

Clay said the agency was reversing its policy on the basis of a study comparing cleanup progress at sites run by the EPA and those turned over to the companies responsible for the pollution.

Clay said the remedies chosen at both types of sites were “fundamentally similar” but acknowledged that the EPA’s credibility had been damaged by the policy of allowing the companies to decide how to clean up their messes.

“We looked at the data on 238 sites and we didn’t find that much difference,” Clay said. “We found differences in the nature of the sites rather than differences in who was paying and who was doing the cleanup.”

Environmental groups disputed Clay’s interpretation of the study’s results, saying they clearly demonstrated that the polluters generally have been taking the cheapest, most convenient approach to restoring contaminated sites.

The EPA’s own data confirms that turning the cleanup over to firms responsible for the pollution was having an “adverse effect” on the choice of remedy, said Donald S. Strait, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The agency has not faced up to the failings of the policy” of allowing polluters to design their own cleanup programs, he said.

Joel S. Hirschhorn, a former analyst at Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment, noted that the EPA study showed startling disparities in cleanup costs between those financed and directed by the government and those turned over to the polluters.

For example, when EPA officials cleaned asbestos-tainted sites, the average cost was $5 million; when private companies removed their own asbestos contamination, they paid an average $1 million per site.

For pesticide contamination, the comparison was $14.1 million for EPA cleanups and $2.4 million for private companies. For pollution by metals and organic compounds, the costs were $23.7 million to $4.6 million.

In several categories, however, the privately directed cleanups cost more. Those included industrial landfills, organic wastes and toxic residues from metal plating.

The EPA study also found differences in the methods used to clean up contaminated sites, although the agency said the differences were not statistically significant.

But critics said companies have tended to leave contaminated soil in place or simply move it to a landfill rather than incinerate it or treat it by other methods. Treatment is considered a more permanent solution than “containment” or reburial, because even modern, lined landfills tend to leak over time, environmentalists contend.

“The (EPA) report shows a clear trend. Fewer treatment remedies are proposed at (company-directed cleanup) sites. This is the single most significant finding of the study,” Strait said.