Government environmental programs were originally designed to clean up the contamination caused by centuries of poor industrial practices in the United States. Unfortunately the regulatory authorities realized that much of our contamination was either technologically impossible or prohibitably expensive to clean up. In the 1990's government adopted "risk based" clean up methods. This meant that contamination was to be cleaned up based upon its future use. In most cases the contamination has been left in place and methods were developed to protect human health and the environment. Examples are caps on a landfill to deal with soil contamination and pump and treat systems to deal with groundwater contamination. All of these risk based clean up methods have one thing in common. The contamination is still in place and must be monitored in order to protect society from its potentially lethal impact.

Earth Pledge recognized that our government was increasingly unable to provide the resources to effectively monitor and report on contaminated sites that have been cleaned up using these risk based methods. Earth Pledge developed the Guardian Trust program to assist government in providing for effective long term stewardship of these contaminated sites. The Guardian Trust is a not-for-profit trust that develops policies and procedures to ensure that contaminated sites such as Superfund sites and Brownfields remain protective of human health and the environment.