On November 19, the U.S. EPA announced the identity of the Hazardous Substance Research Centers (HSRCs) that will be headquartered at five U.S. universities for the next five years. The agency’s administrator, Christie Whitman, announced that the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response and Office of Research and Development are awarding a total of $22 million to the centers for basic and applied research projects.

Established in 1989 under the Superfund reauthorization act of 1986, the centers receive funding for five years, after which they must reapply for the grants, says Mitch Lasat of the agency’s National Center for Environmental Research. Only one of the new centers that are beginning operations in fiscal year 2002 was operational during the past five years, the center at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, La. A second center at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, Ore., was previously associated with a center at Stanford University.

Most of the HSRCs have ties with other universities; this year, 17 universities in addition to the five headquarter universities will receive some funding for hazardous substance research projects. In addition to EPA, the HSRCs are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Defense, academia, and other state and federal government agencies.

“The goal for these centers is for them to become self-supporting,” Lasat says, although he was not aware if any of the centers that will no longer be funded would continue to exist. However, most—but not all—of the universities not receiving funding this year will continue to receive some grant money through their associations with the new centers. For example, Stanford University will continue to be actively involved with research at the center now headquartered at OSU, says Perry McCarty, the Silas H. Palmer Professor Emeritus at Stanford’s Environmental Engineering and Science department.

The EPA Center for Hazardous Substances in Urban Environments, which will be headquartered at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., will receive $5.2 million. It will focus on detecting, assessing, and managing risks associated with the use and disposal of hazardous substances in urban settings such as the abandoned industrial facilities known as brownfields.

The other four centers will investigate how to remove contaminants from the environment. The Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Plains Hazardous Substance Research Center for Integrated Remediation Using Managed Natural Systems, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., will receive $4.5 million to focus on low-cost remediation technologies like phytoremediation to remove contaminants and restore ecosystem quality.

OSU will be home to the Western Region Hazardous Substance Research Center for Developing In-Situ Processes for VOC Remediation in Groundwater and Soils. The center has been granted $4.5 million to focus on subsurface technologies with an emphasis on mathematical and physical modeling.

Dealing with contaminated sediments is the continued focus of the South and Southwest Hazardous Substance Research Center, which has been headquartered at LSU since 1991. The center will receive $4.5 million in additional funding.

The fifth center is the Rocky Mountain Hazardous Substance Research Center for Remediation of Mine Waste Sites. Headquartered at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., it will receive $3.8 million to improve methods for cleaning up environmental problems such as the acid mining waste that contaminates water bodies.

For more information about the HSRCs, go to http://es.epa.gov/ncer/centers/hsrc/. —KELLYN S. BETTS