Here's a timely one. It doesn't take a satellite to see, but the aerial view reveals the scale pretty well. This is the ASARCO Tacoma Smelter site. "ASARCO" = American Smelting and Refining Company.

From 1890-1912, lead was smelt and refined, then they switched mainly to copper smelting until the smelter closed in 1985. The landfill and peninsula began to be created in the 1940s, as molten slag by-products were dumped into Commencement Bay, a part of Puget Sound.

The entire peninsula was created from smelter slag, as was the fill along the shore below. The "slag peninsula" (I don't know if it has an official name) is 23 acres in size, and the slag fill totals an estimated 15 million tons. The slag is made of various toxic pollutants, especially heavy metals, much of which is leaching out into the bay and Puget Sound. Besides lead, there are large amounts of arsenic. The arsenic was also emitted into the air via a tall smokestack, recently demolished. Studies of the air-borne emissions found high levels of arsenic in the soil all around the smelter, North Tacoma, Vashon Island, Gig Harbor, and many other nearby regions.

It is one of the major Superfund sites on Puget Sound, and the EPA has divided it into several parts, each its own designated Superfund site. In recent years, ASARCO and the EPA have been working to clean the place up, but the job is enormous. Some progress has been made, and you can see in this imagery some parts of the site have been regraded in the cleanup process. Many of the smelter buildings are gone. There are plans to make the slag peninsula part of Point Defiance Park. It already shelters a marina.

What makes this timely is that three weeks ago to the day, ASARCO filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This seems to be the common pattern for many large companies like ASARCO. In effect, a sizable amount of the Industrial Revolution in the USA is being subsidized by Americans today, and for a long time to come. People now retired or dead made big profits, and handed the clean-up costs to the future public.

The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department made a large poster about the site and the use of GIS in studying the arsenic emissions. Excerpts of it are included in this year's ESRI Map Book. I wrote the text blurb in the Map Book. Here's a link to the full poster (3.5 MB PDF):

http://seattle.gii.net/~pfly/TheArsenicProject.pdf

EPA's "summary page":
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/programs/recycle/success/1-pagers/asarco.htm