Managing Corporate Environmental Liability 
Environmental liability is a high priority issue, one that involves real estate transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and site contamination and spills. In all of these contexts, companies have developed systems to manage these liabilities and a combination of financial, legal, and technological approaches to remove liabilities from the balance sheet and, if possible, turn them into assets. In almost all of the scenarios leading to some environmental liability, chemical contamination is an issue. This leads to questions like “what is the nature and extent of this contamination and is my company wholly responsible for it? What tools do I have to understand and fairly assess my liability?” These questions have been asked by many property owners and insurers in the course of conventional site assessment and remediation activities, Superfund, natural resource damage assessments, Oil Spill Protection Act 1990, and due diligence investigations associated with property acquisitions and sales. Companies have found great benefits in using ‘integrated forensics’—a combination of techniques - to unravel complex site histories, inputs of contaminants, industrial processes and operations, and chemical contributions. Use of this information then helps a company or a group of contributors develop allocation models for assigning responsibility and hence costs. Part of the liability allocation process and integrated forensics toolkit is the use of environmental forensics, the systematic investigation of a contaminated site(s) or an event(s) focused on defensibly allocating liability for the contamination. Liability associated with industrial property management can come from both public and private law. In the public law forum, federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund) yield civil and criminal liabilities for companies, their corporate officers, and even individual employees. In the private law forum, corporations can be held strictly liable for any and all harm resulting from their activities, regardless of fault or negligence. Neighboring property owners, past or future property owners, local or national citizens groups, communities, and specialty lawyers can precipitate tort cases claiming damages, thereby forcing defendants to defend themselves. The complexity of an environmental forensics investigation commands that rational and defensible scientific practices be employed by credible and impartial technical experts. Battelle utilizes a multi-component approach, comprised of advanced chemical fingerprinting, geological and hydrological data, fate and transport modeling, site-specific historical data, and statistical and numerical analyses, to formulate a technically sound and defensible assessment of contaminant type(s), source(s), and potential age(s). With this information in hand, corporations and their counsels are in a much stronger position to assess their environmental liability and proceed knowledgeably and accordingly. For more information about Battelle’s Environmental Forensics Practice, contact Dr. Scott A. Stout at (781) 934-0571, stouts@battelle.org. 
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