Twenty-seven years ago, after environmental disasters like Love Canal, the feds created a Superfund program to clean up America's toxic waste dumps. But today, that effort has run out of steam and stands underfunded and largely forgotten–despite the fact that nearly half of all Americans live within 10 miles of Superfund sites.

This worrisome bit of news comes from "Wasting Away," the latest investigation out of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity. The center found that fewer than 20 percent of the dumps have been cleaned up enough to be removed from the Environmental Protection Agency's list of worst sites and that the agency recoups only a fraction of what it used to get from polluters to clean up the mess. The center's website includes a handy database of all 1,623 Superfund sites searchable by state and company, complete with maps, contaminants, and population figures.

U.S. Superfund Sites

Source: Center for Public Integrity