On April 17, the first day of Earth Week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced the final adoption of regulations to implement the state’s Environmental Justice Law. According to the Office of the Governor, the Environmental Justice Law and corresponding regulation is the “first in the nation aimed at reducing pollution in historically overburdened communities and communities of color that have been subjected to a disproportionately high number of environmental and public health issues.”
As previously reported by ELM here, Gov. Murphy signed the Environmental Justice legislation in September 2020. The regulations were then developed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (“DEP”) through an extensive stakeholder process.
April 17 marked the day the regulations — which require enhanced upfront community engagement before pollution-generating facilities are proposed in New Jersey’s already overburdened communities — were published in the New Jersey Register. The regulations further direct permit applicants to avoid and minimize environmental and public health stressors, and enable the DEP to establish permit conditions to better protect vulnerable communities. Generally, the Environmental Justice Law “enhances existing environmental laws that did not previously enable DEP to consider environmental and public health stressors on a community level and empowers DEP to evaluate pollution potential on a facility-wide basis and apply conditions that will help facilities avoid and minimize adverse impacts.”
The eight types of facilities covered by the Environmental Justice regulations are:
- Major sources of air pollution, such as gas-fired power plants and cogeneration facilities;
- Resource-recovery facilities or incinerators and sludge processing facilities;
- Sewage-treatment plants with a capacity of more than 50-million gallons per day;
- Transfer stations and solid waste facilities;
- Recycling facilities that receive at least 100 tons of recyclable material per day;
- Scrap-metal facilities;
- Landfills, and
- Medical-waste incinerators (except those at hospitals and universities).
To assist in locating overburdened communities and identify covered facilities within those communities, the DEP has developed the Environmental Justice Mapping, Assessment and Protection tool, which can be found here.
Other jurisdictions are closely monitoring New Jersey’s Environmental Justice Regulations to evaluate their impact and to determine whether they are appropriate for their states.