The New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation Essay

The citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act is an important tool to protect and improve rivers, creeks, streams, and wetlands especially as state agencies may not have the resources to conduct regular water quality monitoring on every water body. Citizen involvement in monitoring and reporting pollution problems is key to watershed protection; hereby helping the government enforce the laws.

It was never considered one of the best neighborhoods but her area never experienced the levels of trash and illegal dumping that I had experienced on that particular visit. Later that year these dumping sites became a huge burden for the city and tax payers due to cleanup cost “Many local governments realize huge costs involved in continuously cleaning these sites up and are beginning to invest in prevention programs”. (Pasternak, 2001)

The Passaic and Hudson rivers are easily the top two environmental problems in New Jersey. Both have shared similar fates, being decimated by the industrial revolution, by factories dumping garbage, medical waste, even war materials during Vietnam. The pharmaceutical industry (huge in NJ). Another issue would be the huge tourist industry surrounding the New Jersey beaches. There is hardly any wildlife left down there because it’s all been urbanized and developed.

In Mantua Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey, privately owned land once stood as one of the most hazardous waste sites in the United States. This site known as the Helen Kramer Landfill included 66-acres of waste, 11 acres of unfavorably conditioned vegetation, and no onsite residents. Prior to the early 1960’s, Helen Keller landfill was a sand and gravel excavation operation, but soon began to incorporate the disposal of waste material for about a decade. After the landfill received numerous inspections and notices between 1971 and 1977, the owner Helen Kramer was informed to cease operation of the landfill. As New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection reports indicated and area residents stated, “sporadic chemical

This is problematic and should undeniably be changed, as landfills are huge pollution hazards and should unquestionably have routinely environmental assessments. Landfill proponents followed the letter of the law/regulations however they did not follow the spirit of public participation where they actively consult residents and give them the opportunity to say ‘no’. Residents did express nuance account of the siting process where the proponents used jargon to further sustain the racial and socio-economic divide of the proponents and the resident’s, proponents of the landfill were mostly white and the residents were mostly black, contributing to this divide. As mentioned by the residents the problems concerning public participation are; the

According to our recent research and analysis, pelletizing our fly ash waste and selling it to the public as low-grade fertilizer would rid us of approximately 500 tons a year. However, we do have the capacity to dump this harmless fly ash on our back 40 acres, an area of land that was classified as a Type III landfill in 1979. Due to a crackdown on the general public and their free dumping on our lot, our forty acres were not approved for fly ash, but now 35 years later the 40 acre landfill is safe and ready for use with no liability to be seen by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2014, January 10). Landfills, Municipal Solid Waste | US EPA. Retrieved from http://www3.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/landfill.htm

The purpose of the landfill was to bury the large amount of contaminated the soil with toxic Polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), a class of chemicals so toxic that Congress banned production later. The whole story began in 1973 when Ward PCB Transformers Company dumped more than 30,000 gallons of PCB-contaminated oil on the side of state roads in 14 North Carolina counties. The trucker, who was responsible for taking the oil to a facility to be recycled, disposed of it discreetly and illegally. The person in charge of the company and the trucker was sent to jail for a short time for their negligence on the matter. Contaminants left in the truck and factory was detoxified. However, the area around the factory as well as the lakes and rivers close to the road had been polluted. As a result, more than 60,000 tons of oils were polluted with toxic PCB.

The environmental protection agency has been stepping up its mandate of ensuring safer and better environment for not only the business operators, buts also the society as a whole. In order to achieve this goal of environmental protection, there has been the creation of environmental protection agency that has ensured that all the businesses, irrespective of their size and type, strive to ensure that the environment is protected for the benefit of current and future generations.

New York City has unique benefits in that there are tremendous amounts of people who live within close proximity to each other. This has resulted in higher uses of mass transit systems (such as: subways and buses). On average, New York’s total environmental footprint is 7.1 metrics tons per person annually. This is much lower than national average of 24.5 metric tons. The city contributes 1% of the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere for the United States each year. (“Inventory Greenhouse of New York City,” 2007) (Jarvey, 2006)

1. How could the law and public policy be used to minimize the negative impact(s) of Sample Drought Executive Order 2016? Explain, giving one example of a type of law or public policy.

The environment and the health of the surrounding population go hand in hand. The Environmental Protection Agency takes on this ever so important mission of protecting them both. The mission statement of the EPA states, “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Small Business Programs is to support the protection of human health and the environment by advocating and advancing the business, regulatory, and environmental compliance concerns of small and socio-economically disadvantaged businesses, and minority academic institutions (US Enviromental Protection Agency, 2010).” The impact of its mission can be defined clearly as it examines the impact of contamination in the air, the water, and the land on human health.

Reports and case studies from grassroots organizations such as the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA) and others have conducted research on this subject. Their comprehensive reports contain information about negative health outcomes. EJA’s mission is to fight for health equity for all. Their campaign “Solid Waste & Transfer Stations”

When garbage or waste materials are tossed into a landfill, people are just asking for nauseating odors and polluted land sites. In Kathy P. Anderson’s article, “THE ENVIRONMENT: Reducing Waste,” she describes that liners are located beneath landfills and when the weather becomes a problem, those liners can leak, allowing leachate to attract to the surface. Saying this, she writes about the quality of environment after a leak: “The leachate then carries pollutants through the soil under the landfill to groundwater and to nearby rivers and lakes. When people or wildlife drink the poisoned water, they can get sick or die” (Anderson). If a liner were to leak, pollutants could be poisonous in the water and be harmful to not only individuals but

in an effort to solve problems, which can be seen with the Clean Water Act.