When New Jersey’s landmark environmental justice law was signed into law in September 2020, there was much to celebrate for activists who had fought hard to prevent further expansion of the relentless pollution that has long plagued the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, the state’s largest city.
More than five years later, the battle continues, but the stage has largely shifted to the courtroom.
In January, the state’s intermediate appellate court unanimously upheld rules put in place to enforce the law. The recycling and construction industries that challenged the rule have appealed to the state Supreme Court, which has not yet decided whether to take the case.
There are other legal skirmishes, all revolving around plans to build yet another power plant in the Ironbound. The plant, the fourth in the vast Ironbound industrial area, is proposed as a backup power source for the state’s largest waste treatment facility, the Passaic Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant.
“This is a very important moment,” said Ana Baptista, a longtime Ironbound activist and associate professor in the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program at New School in New York.
And it’s all playing out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s cuts and watering down of environmental policies and protections. The state’s new governor, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, has expressed a desire to confront Trump. But her administration, which includes a new director of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), is just getting started.
“I think this is going to be a very important year,” Baptista said. “We are being very careful.”
The new plant was proposed after the massive Passaic Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant lost power during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, spewing hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the streets. The sewer commission said it wanted to prevent a new natural gas backup plant from happening again, but much to the dismay of environmentalists, the DEP approved a permit for the plant only for emergency backup purposes.
Ironbound Community Corporation, which provides educational, environmental and housing assistance to residents and advocates for environmental justice legislation, is challenging the permit in the state Appellate Division. ICC also filed a lawsuit in June, along with the City of Newark, against the Passaic Valley Sewer Commission seeking approval for the project. Two judges ordered a halt to construction while the lawsuit continues.
Landmark Environmental Justice Act
Charles Lee, a former Environmental Protection Agency official known as one of the pioneers of the environmental justice movement, said New Jersey is currently doing a lot of thinking about how to move forward with what he described as a “very strong law.”
“These are issues that have been raised for decades and need to be addressed,” said Lee, now a visiting fellow at the Howard University School of Law’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice.
Lee said the Ironbound area, like Chicago’s South Side and Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, carries a burden of pollution from a variety of industries. “The environmental burden is incredibly concentrated,” Lee said.
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The state’s business community has not accepted the law and its accompanying regulations.
In a January statement after the appeals court upheld the rule, the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce expressed disappointment. Ray Cantor, the association’s deputy director of government affairs, said the rules go too far and have a “chilling effect” on the business community.
The New Jersey chapter of the Scrap Recycling Industry Association said in a petition to the state Supreme Court in February that the rule poses an “existential threat” to the recycling industry and goes beyond the scope of the Environmental Justice Act. “The importance of this issue to New Jersey businesses cannot be overstated,” the Institute’s attorneys said in a statement.
In court in the ICC case against the Passaic Valley Sewer Commission, the commission’s attorney, Dennis Driscoll, said the complaint should be dismissed and that the proposed power plant should be used only in emergencies.
Under the 2020 law, the DEP must consider the impacts of projects such as power plants on poor and minority communities that are already disproportionately harmed by pollution. The bill would require regulators to deny permits to facilities that would unavoidably add pollution to overburdened communities, unless the project is in a compelling public interest and the cumulative effects of pollution from various industries must be considered. This essentially adds another layer of oversight on top of existing environmental laws.
A number of states, including California, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, have enacted similar laws or mandated analysis and consideration of similar issues. But the strength of New Jersey’s law is that it denies permits that pollute overburdened communities and requires cumulative impact analyses. New York passed a law in 2023, but some believe the law could end up being even stricter than New Jersey.
This law protects communities across New Jersey, but it is especially important for the Ironbound area, which has a mix of housing, stores, and restaurants on one side and large industrial areas on the other. The giant Passaic Valley sewage treatment plant, the state’s largest trash incinerator, and the contaminated remains of an old Agent Orange factory all sit in the gritty shadow of the New Jersey Turnpike, the Port of Newark, and Liberty International Airport.
The main street, Doremus Street, is known as the “chemical corridor”, lined with warehouses and factories. Diesel trucks drive by as planes take off or descend from the nearby airport. Traffic seems to be going in every direction, and the smell of all the industries pervades the community.
For Ironbound Community Corp., decades of pollution have taken a toll on the health of its neighbors, who face high rates of asthma and a variety of chronic health conditions.
Nikki Sheets, a longtime environmental activist in New Jersey, said it took a long time to gain support for the idea of an environmental justice bill, but the community’s persistence paid off.
“We’ve been talking about this for a long time. Maybe it makes sense for us to be the first to do something innovative like this,” he said. Now, he said the activist community will continue to press to ensure the law is implemented.
“We are persistent,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Seat and others in the Ironbound district are encouraged by an appeals decision upholding the rule and an interim order halting construction of the new plant.
“This is uplifting and gives us hope,” said Jonathan J. Smith, an attorney with Earthjustice who represents the Ironbound community.
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