New Jersey attempts to fix industrial polluting loophole

A portion of New Jersey’s law that regulates industrial pollution needs to be rewritten. NJ Spotlight’s Tom Johnson recently brought this to our attention in this week’s article Law Would Make It Tougher for Polluters to Walk Away from Contaminated Sites. He explains why the N.J. Legislature is drafting new language that would revive a state requirement that industrial operators certify that their land is not significantly polluted before closing or selling their facility.  

While much of this is just repairing existing policy, the story is part of the long bitter fight in Jersey between the industrial sector and environmentalists. It’s a fight that erupted full scale in the early 1980’s when remnants of Agent Orange were found at the The Diamond Alkali in Newark, N.J. Johnson says it was this event that led to New Jersey’s Environmental Clean-Up Responsibility Act (ECRA), which was later renamed Industrial Site Recovery Act