There are many reasons why I continue to think about WALL-E, the sublime, dreamy movie from Pixar, a week after having seen it, not the least of which is because it’s the first brownfields love story ever told on screen. More relevant though is the timely message for those of us who are involved in the difficult, expensive, and many times overwhelming labor of reclaiming polluted land in a way that’s environmentally sustainable and—this is key—economically feasible. When one stops to consider the cost and heartache associated with overcoming technical challenges, limiting legal liability, complying with so called “streamlined” cleanup rules, and managing the expectations and demands of regulators, it’s a wonder that anyone is in this business at all or, once in, stays in past the first project.

The fact that most of us on the private-sector side are here because we want to be—that is, on a voluntary basis—would lead an outsider to question our prudence and our sanity. So what is it that attracts us? As private-sector stakeholders, what is it precisely about the underlying business model that makes brownfields redevelopment viable? Here is where the movie becomes further instructive. Having rendered the Earth completely uninhabitable due to centuries of wanton waste production and careless waste management, the entire population packs it in and heads out to spend the next 700 years on a super-sized spacecraft, leaving our spinning brownfields planet to cute, automated, waste sorting and processing machines (and one bug). ...

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