By Jung Sung-ki Staff Reporter South Korea has accepted nine more closed U.S. military facilities here as a joint committee under the Korea-U.S. status of forces agreement approved the base return, the Ministry of National Defense said Friday. But some environmental groups condemned the decision, demanding a full-scale environmental cleanup of the returned bases paid for by the U.S. Progressive lawmakers pledged that they will address the issue in an extraordinary session of the National Assembly this month. The bases occupy more than 3.8 million square meters of land. ``We will draw up plans to use the returned land efficiently at an early date after taking necessary steps such as surveying and performing additional base cleanups, and consulting with the local governments concerned,'' Kim Kwang-woo, an official at the ministry's facility management bureau, said in a briefing. Kim said the government will make public the returned military facilities to legislators this month. The returned facilities include Camp Page in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province; Camp Falling Water and Camp Sears, north of Seoul; Camp Edwards and Camp Garry Owen in Paju near the inter-Korean border; and the Koon-ni range in Maehyang-ri, Gyeonggi Province. So far, the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) has handed over 23 of 59 military facilities agreed to be returned to the Korean government under a 2004 land swap deal aimed at repositioning U.S. troops south of Seoul. However, Kim admitted environmental cleanups of the returned land by the USFK have not met national environmental standards. ``The two sides have engaged in several negotiations over the base cleanup issue but there are still some unresolved problems,'' the official said, adding the USFK has rejected South Korea's offer to verify the base cleanup status. Kim said the government has its own data regarding contamination levels at the returned bases but declined to disclose it. He also rejected giving an assessment on how much South Korea would share the cost of decontaminating soil and underground water at the returned bases. According to a government report submitted to the Assembly's environmental committee, an estimated $85 million will be required to clean up land to a level allowing fruit cultivation; and decontaminating lands to allow rice growing will require $19 million. The USFK has argued that it made efforts that ``go beyond'' the SOFA by removing polluted underground storage tanks inside camps, removing lead and copper left at former firing ranges using an advanced technique called ``bio-slurping,'' treating petroleum-contaminated soil by creating vents in the land and skimming fuel from groundwater. The SOFA stipulates that USFK can return land without environmental treatment of pollutants beyond those posing ``known, imminent, and substantial endangerment to human health.'' USFK officials stress that South Korea is receiving the sites and infrastructure, worth an estimated $1 billion, at no cost. Earlier this year, Rep. Woo Won-shik of the pro-government Uri Party, said some U.S. bases returned last year contain dumped electronic transformers with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) exceeding national environmental standards, citing a parliamentary report. The report indicated that dumped transformers in Camp Colbern in Gyeonggi Province have a PCB concentration of 88.16mg/l, 44 times higher than the permission level of 2mg/l, said Woo. The toxicity of PCBs varies considerably. The most commonly observed health effects in people exposed to large amounts of PCBs are skin conditions such as chloracne lesions and rashes. gallantjung@koreatimes.co.kr