What is cost recovery?

Cost recovery is the action that the federal government, states, and private parties may take to recover what they spent on cleanup activities at a site. If the EPA does the cleanup work using Superfund money, it will try to recover those costs from responsible parties. More information is available on the agency's Recovering Cleanup Costs web page. Additionally, policy and guidance documents relevant to how the EPA recovers cleanup costs are available from the cost recovery topic on the Superfund Cleanup Enforcement policy and guidance database.