“Why is New Jersey called the Garden State?”

“Because ‘Oil and Petrochemical Refinery State’ wouldn’t fit on a license plate?”

–Gracie Hart, Miss Congeniality c.2000

Overview

Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, most individuals notice the towering chemical manufacturing plants and dark grey smoke billowing into the air. What they may not know, is that New Jersey has another serious environmental and health concern—more Superfund Sites on the National Priorities List than any other State. The National Priorities List (NPL) comes from the CERLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act) passed in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter. (“What Is Superfund?,” 2018)

Since its passage, countless sites have been proposed and rated on the Hazard Ranking System, with the ultimate goal of being deleted. The “EPA may delete a final NPL site if it determines that no further response is required to protect human health or the environment.” (“Superfund: National,” 2018) Unfortunately, some sites have been re-added to the list at a later date due to community outcry and the rate of deletion has been seen as in-efficient at best throughout this law’s 40-year history. (“Not so Super,” 1994, p. 16) For example, the “Cornell Dubilier Electronics plant in South Plainfield. The E.P.A., which began work on the site in 1997, said the cleanup would not be completed until 2034.” (Holmberg, 2008)

Some of the challenges facing the EPA include the way the law itself is constructed. One of its original aims was to force the responsible party to be financially liable for the cleanup. (“What Is Superfund?,” 2018) A fund, paid for by taxes on corporations called the Orphan Fund, would pay for the sites where an owner could not be identified. However, a significant number of these sites are considered Orphan Sites. Since 1995 when the Orphan Fund lost its tax funding, the EPA has had to depend on appropriations from Congress to fund these remediations. (“The Return,” 2010, p. 18) This funding is often unpredictable since it is dependent on the leanings of the current administration. Additionally, some local governments have stated that remediation efforts by the EPA are not efficient, potentially increase levels of pollution in their air, water and soil, and negatively affect property prices. (Schneider, 1993, p. 7)

As you can see in the above visualization, there were 114 active sites in 2019. A total of 35 have been deleted over 40 years of CERLA being in place, making the rate of deletion for New Jersey less than one site per year. Furthermore, of the 114 sites still considered active, over 70 have been on the National Priorities List since the 1980s.

Contaminated sites hold real environmental and health consequences for those living near them. Even though remediation is an extremely time consuming and expensive endeavor, the impacts of toxic waste cannot be ignored or delayed. The longer the EPA and individual states wait for funding, the longer people are living in unsafe conditions, breathing polluted air and drinking contaminated water. Without action, the rate of deletion will continue to be low, the National Priorities List will continue to be long and communities will continue to be at risk.

Data Description

My script takes the 1,810 total entries and separates New Jersey entries into a file called NJ_SupfundSites.csv. It then creates eight CSV files based on four time periods:1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009 and 2010-2019.

Each CSV file contains entries that have a Listing Date up to the time frame but don’t have a Deletion Date earlier than the time frame. Thus, the entries in the individual time periods represent the superfund sites that were active at those times. The count CSV files contain the sites that were deleted off the list during a given time frame. This data is used for the counts visible on the PNG files and the visualization.

For each time frame, the CSV files of the Superfund sites were visualized in QGIS1 and layered over a New Jersey County Boundary shape-file from the NJ Department of GIS website.

For each of the four time periods shown on the visualization, the green dots are superfund sites that have been deleted from the National Priorities List, while the red dots are active sites. Each of the maps created for the time periods were then exported to PNG files from QGIS2, resized using GIMP3, and uploaded onto GIPHY4. The GIF file was then exported as a video encoded in MPEG-45 and downloaded.

Works Cited

Holmberg, D. (2008, January 20). At Some Superfund Sites, Toxic Legacies Linger. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20Rsuperfund.html?searchResultPosition=58

Not So Super Superfund. (1994, February 7). The New York Times, sec. A, p. 16. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/07/opinion/not-so-super-superfund.html?searchResultPosition=19

The Return of Superfund. (2010, June 27). The New York Times, sec. A, p. 18. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28mon2.html?searchResultPosition=4

Schneider, K. (1993, September 6). E.P.A. Superfund at 13: a White Knight Tarnished. The New York Times, sec. 1, p. 7. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/06/us/epa-superfund-at-13-a-white-knight-tarnished.html?searchResultPosition=85

Superfund: National Priorities List Deletion. (2018, November 29). Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-national-priorities-list-deletion

What is Superfund? (2018, November 30). Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://www.epa.gov/superfund/what-superfund

Author: Alexandra Burke. Last edited: 2020-05-05.

  1. QGIS. Software released through CC-BY-SA by the QGIS Development Team. Accessed 2020-05-02. Online: https://www.qgis.org↩︎

  2. QGIS. Software released through CC-BY-SA by the QGIS Development Team. Accessed 2020-05-02. Online: https://www.qgis.org↩︎

  3. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Software released through CC-BY-SA by The GIMP Development Team. Accessed 2020-05-02. Online: https://www.gimp.org/↩︎

  4. GIPHY Website that changes PNG files into GIF and Mp4 files. Online: https://giphy.com↩︎

  5. Moving Picture Experts Group Standard 4 (MPEG-4). Standard developed by a working group of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) joint technical committee. Accessed 2020-05-02. Online: https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/↩︎