RESEARCH ARTICLE Community response to a sustainable restoration plan for a superfund site Virinder Sidhu 1 & Dibyendu Sarkar 1 & Rupali Datta 2 & Barry Solomon 3 Received: 2 January 2018 /Accepted: 26 March 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Large-scale copper (Cu) mining activities in Michigan’ s Upper Peninsula produced millions of metric tons of mining wastes also known as stamp sands. The stamp sands containing high concentrations of Cu were disposed of into several lakes connected to the Lake Superior. Eventually, as aquatic organisms in these lakes started to exhibit toxicity symptoms, the stamp sands were dredged and discarded on the lake shores. Consequently, these areas turned into degraded, marginal lands and were collectively classified as a Torch Lake Superfund site by the US EPA. Due to the lack of vegetative cover, the Cu-rich stamp sands eroded into the lakes, affecting the aquatic life. To alleviate this issue, a sustainable restoration plan (SRP) was developed and tested in a greenhouse environment prior to field implementation. Cold-tolerant oilseed crops, camelina (Camelina sativa) and field pen- nycress (Thlaspi arvense), were grown on compost-fertilized stamp sands, which reduced soil erosion by acting as a vegetative cap. Oilseed plants produced normal yield, demonstrating their potential utilization as biofuel feedstock. Prior to implementing the SRP in field-scale in the Torch Lake Superfund site, a public opinion survey of the local community was conducted to understand the views of residents. Door-to-door survey was performed in July–August 2015, which yielded a response rate of 68.1%. Results showed that residents were generally concerned with stamp sand erosion into the Torch Lake and were over- whelmingly supportive of the SRP, which would not only provide environmental benefits but could boost the local economy via biofuel production. To gauge the general environmental awareness of the respondents, the survey included questions on climate change. Most of the respondents acknowledged that climate change is real and anthropogenically mediated. Having college education and a relatively high annual household income showed a positive and significant correlation with climate change awareness. Keywords Stamp sand . Torch Lake . Camelina . Field pennycress . Biofuel . Sustainable restoration plan Introduction Large-scale copper (Cu) mining activities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century have led to the environment being contaminated by Cu (Cusack and Mihelcic 1999; Weston 2007). At its peak, activities relating to Cu mining produced millions of tons of mine tailings in this region. The mine tailings were produced by crushing the rocks containing Cu by a process known as stamping; hence, the mine tailings were known as stamp sands (Cusack and Mihelcic 1999; Weston 2007). The stamp sands containing high Cu concentrations were dumped into the nu- merous interior lakes which were connected to Lake Superior. Torch Lake, a part of Keweenaw waterway, is connected to Lake Superior through Portage Lake in Michigan’ s Upper Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-018-1885-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dibyendu Sarkar dsarkar@stevens.edu 1 Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA 2 Department of Biological Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA 3 Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA Environmental Science and Pollution Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-018-1885-6