Environmental law in New Jersey
Until then, environmental issues were primarily handled on the local level, in form of ordinances regulating the disposal of waste and sewage and providing for the distribution of drinking water to the city's inhabitants.
An example that more closely resembles contemporary environmental regulations is a 1927 ordinance adopted by Union City "prohibiting the emission of dense smoke from and the use of bituminous coal in certain fuel-burning equipment and imposing penalties for violations thereof," which represents an early attempt to control air pollution in the city.
However, in its initial form, this law merely authorized the state to delineate an area and being at risk of flood and inform municipalities and the public of this fact.
The NJDEP enforces the federal Clean Air Act of 1963 through its State Implementation Plan (SIP), a combination of statutes, regulations, rules applying to single facilities in the state, and quasi-regulatory provisions such as plans developed by the NJDEP to address a specific issue.
The Clean Air Act sets National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead, and requires each state to adopt regulations in order to meet the standards.
According to the NJDEP's website, "[t]he types of regulated facilities can range from very small users such as campgrounds, schools, and shopping centers to larger industrial and municipal wastewater dischargers.
[23] The "Spill Compensation and Control Act" authorizes the NJDEP to clean up sites and surrounding natural areas that have been contaminated with hazardous substances, and, more significantly, it authorizes the NJDEP to receive compensation for the remediation costs from "any person who has discharged a hazardous substance, or is in any way responsible" for the discharge.
[24] It also holds the persons involved "strictly liable, jointly and severally, without regard to fault, for all cleanup and removal costs,"[24] which is a very strong form of liability.
For example, in State Department of Environmental Protection v. Ventron Corp, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the parent corporation of the polluting company, as well as private individuals who had purchased part of the contaminated property, were liable for cleanup costs.
[25] Where the "Spill Compensation and Control Act" is intended to apply to cases in which hazardous substances have been accidentally or deliberately released into the surrounding environment, particularly groundwater, the "Industrial Site Recovery Act" (ISRA) applies to industrial facilities that have been contaminated through the normal operation of the facility.
ISRA has fundamentally the same purpose as ECRA, however, which is to hold the owner of an industrial facility responsible for the cleanup of the site.
"[28] The Green Acres program, first established in 1961, allows the state, municipalities, and non-profit grounds to purchase land to permanently preserve as open space.
For southern New Jersey, the Pinelands Protection Act regulates development in the Pinelands National Reserve, and, for northern New Jersey, the "Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act" regulates development in the Highlands region, a swath of land in the northern half of the state that contains the Appalachian mountains and which is a significant source of drinking water for the state.
"[32] The state legislature then enacted the "Pinelands Protection Act" in order to implement the goals of the federal law.
215), which has served as New Jersey's equivalent to statutory environmental policy acts in other states and the federal NEPA statute.
[38] New Jersey's state environmental review requirements are comparatively less extensive than those in New York and certain other states, where the determination of project type (and the corresponding depth of the review process) is based on a more substantive classification of a project's likely impacts, rather than the simple cost or land-area thresholds employed by New Jersey under E.O.
