Dry cleaner environmental cleanup liability falls on current property owners, not polluters

Under CERCLA (Superfund law) and most state environmental statutes, current property owners can be held liable for contamination cleanup regardless of whether they caused it. When a dry cleaner using perc closes or moves, the contamination remains -- PCE sinks through soil, sits on clay layers, and contaminates groundwater plumes for decades. The former dry cleaner operator (often a dissolved small business or deceased individual) is judgment-proof, so the cleanup cost of $500,000 to $1 million falls on whoever currently owns the property. This matters because property owners who bought or inherited strip mall parcels, mixed-use buildings, or commercial lots years after the dry cleaner left now face six-figure remediation bills they never anticipated and cannot avoid. Some properties become effectively unsellable because environmental liability exceeds the property's market value. The structural root cause is that CERCLA's strict liability regime was designed for large industrial polluters, not small dry cleaners, and only a handful of states (like Illinois, Connecticut, and Florida) have created dry cleaner environmental response trust funds funded by industry surcharges to shift cleanup costs away from innocent current owners.