West Lake Landfill

West Lake Landfill is an unlined mixed-waste landfill located in Bridgeton, Missouri, near St. Louis and the Mississippi River, whose contents have been shown to include radioactive waste; it is thus also an EPA Superfund cleanup site. In 1973, after having changed hands (and responsible oversight) several times, a portion of original stored radioactive material at a nearby storage facility—the material with lowest relative radioactivity, a leached barium sulfate residue originating from the Manhattan Project—was combined with topsoil to dilute the contaminated material. It was then illegally dumped at the West Lake site. Due to the discovery of the radioactive and other contaminants at the site, West Lake was proposed as a Superfund site in October 1989, and after undergoing an extensive feasibility study, it was officially listed as such a site in August 1990.