NEWSWORKS TONIGHT

Cities have long contained neighborhoods where factories and other polluting facilities are clustered together. Residents in places such as Chester and Camden bear more than their fair share of pollution.

Joni Sampson argues her neighborhood in Trenton, though it lacks major facilities like incinerators and refineries, is among them.

On a recent afternoon, she stood outside Trenton Iron and Metal Works, about four blocks from her house, where a crane unloaded metal scrap from a truck and added it to a towering pile of old cars, kitchen sinks and a school bus. Particles from a metal shredder rose like smoke from the far end of the yard.

Within a few blocks of her house is the iron works, a trucking company, a fragrance factory and natural gas refueling station, where Central Jersey Waste and Recycling has proposed the building of a new recycling sorting facility.

Sampson has been spearheading the fight against it moving to the neighborhood.

“How much more can a neighborhood take, how much more?” Sampson said.

In the spring of 2010, after the facility had already been approved and written into the county's solid waste management plan, Sampson and her civic organization, the Eyes of Trenton, packed a freeholder meeting and got the board to rewrite the plan to take it out.

Nycol Thomas, who lives across the street from the proposed site, said a major concern was the emissions 500 new truck trips a day would bring.

“We have working families here, we have children growing up, what's going to happen to their developing lungs?” Thomas said. “That’s what we're considering.”

The recycling company sued and a judge sided with the company, ruling that the extra truck traffic would have next to no effect on air quality, and pollutant levels would be well under allowable standards. But legality, say environmental justice advocates, should no longer be the barometer for citing these kinds of facilities.  

“The problem is that a lot of the pollution being emitted today is legal,” said   Nicky Sheats, director of the Center for Urban Environment at Thomas Edison State College and member of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance.

“We still think though, even if you don't have a violation of a standard that it's still having detrimental health impacts on residents, when you take into account all the cumulative effects,” Sheats said.

Nycol Thomas, who lives across the street from the proposed site, said a major concern was the emissions 500 new truck trips a day would bring.

Sheats is one of many environmental advocates moving away from focusing on just the worst actors--polluters that rack up fines for breaking emissions laws. Instead, he focuses on cumulative impacts: the idea that incremental levels of pollution from a host of smaller, legal sources can adversely affect health in high-impact areas.

“Say you have 10 pollutants and you're at 75 percent of each standard, well, we would say something's happening, when you take into account all those pollutants,” Sheats said.

Sheats is working on a model ordinance in Newark that would require cities to inventory existing sources of pollution, and make companies distribute to neighbors information on what, if any, pollution their operation would add.

The proposed ordinance would apply at the municipal level, but major polluting facilities are regulated by the state.

“Under current statues and regulations, our hands are somewhat tied when it comes to cumulative impacts,” said Irene Kropp, Deputy Commissioner for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Kropp said if someone wanted to build a new incinerator in Camden's South Waterfront neighborhood, for example, where industry is already clustered, the presence of neighboring polluters alone could not bar the DEP from issuing a permit.

“As long as someone is putting in the proper air pollution controls, water pollution controls,” Kropp said, “then I don't have the authority to say 'No, you cannot be located here.'”

The department has been working to develop a tool that takes into account a slew of factors in neighborhoods--it uses data on dry cleaners, landfills, hazardous waste sites, traffic patterns and air quality, among other factors--to determine whether certain neighborhoods are overburdened. Kropp said the department hopes to finish the tool and develop a plan for integrating it into the permitting and enforcement process by December of 2012.

“We call it the next generation of environmental management, not listening to and being bound by regulations and statutes that are 10, 20, 30, 40 years old,” Kropp said. “How do you change the face of a state or the face of a nation from an environmental perspective?"

Michael Egenton, chief lobbyist for the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, said he and others are trying to change the face of the state in a different way--by attracting new businesses--and he is worried this approach might hurt the cause.

“Our concern, I guess from a business perspective, is to make sure that we don't do anything draconian or overly burdensome,” Egenton said. 

He is against changing DEP regulations or state legislation to tie permitting to cumulative impact analyses, especially since there is no national model for doing so.

“As we develop new policies and new standards and such, we've always encouraged and recommended  it be done on the federal level,” Egenton said.  “You start doing it piecemeal and individual states start doing their own thing, that puts you at an economic disadvantage.”

While others work to shape policy, Joni Sampson will continue to battle through the courts. Her civic organization is appealing the decision to allow the recycling facility to move in one street over