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For Immediate Release
February, 03 2009, 02:30pm EDT
Contact:
Jenny Powers, NRDC, 212-727-4566
Toxic Chromium Clean-Up Battle in Jersey City Heads to Federal Court
Lawsuit Against PPG Follows Successful $400 Million Case Against Honeywell
WASHINGTON
After 25 years of negligence, the largest remaining Jersey City
site riddled with cancer-causing hexavalent chromium is the focus of a
citizen's lawsuit filed today by the Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC) and the Interfaith Community Organization (ICO). The suit calls
for PPG Industries, a Pittsburgh-based corporation responsible for the
toxic contamination, to clean up the 16.6-acre site and surrounding
contaminated areas located in a densely populated area along Garfield
Avenue.
NRDC and ICO filed the
lawsuit today in federal district court in Newark under the citizens'
suit provisions of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
(RCRA). This lawsuit comes on the heels of a recent ICO win that
forced Honeywell International Corporation to commit $400 million to
clean up a 34-acre Jersey City site, where the company's predecessors
dumped the same toxic chromium waste.
lawsuit today in federal district court in Newark under the citizens'
suit provisions of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
(RCRA). This lawsuit comes on the heels of a recent ICO win that
forced Honeywell International Corporation to commit $400 million to
clean up a 34-acre Jersey City site, where the company's predecessors
dumped the same toxic chromium waste.
"After
25 years of stalling, it's time for PPG to take responsibility and
clean up this toxic mess," said Nancy Marks, NRDC senior attorney.
"For a quarter of a century, PPG has knowingly endangered the health of
countless residents, commuters and school children, who pass by this
contaminated site every day. The Garfield Avenue community has been
poisoned by indifference. This willful negligence must end."
25 years of stalling, it's time for PPG to take responsibility and
clean up this toxic mess," said Nancy Marks, NRDC senior attorney.
"For a quarter of a century, PPG has knowingly endangered the health of
countless residents, commuters and school children, who pass by this
contaminated site every day. The Garfield Avenue community has been
poisoned by indifference. This willful negligence must end."
PPG
first began investigating the chromium contamination in 1982. The New
Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) began enforcement
efforts at the PPG complex soon thereafter, and in 1990 reached an
agreement requiring PPG to clean up dozens of sites the DEP believed
they had contaminated. Those clean-up efforts should have been
completed by the late 1990s, but PPG has yet to engage in the chromium
removal project and the DEP has failed to enforce a clean-up.
first began investigating the chromium contamination in 1982. The New
Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) began enforcement
efforts at the PPG complex soon thereafter, and in 1990 reached an
agreement requiring PPG to clean up dozens of sites the DEP believed
they had contaminated. Those clean-up efforts should have been
completed by the late 1990s, but PPG has yet to engage in the chromium
removal project and the DEP has failed to enforce a clean-up.
"We've
tried everything else," said Ellen Wright, a leader of ICO who has
lived in the area of the former PPG complex for 43 years. "We've asked
every governor and every Department of Environmental Protection
commissioner since 1989 to get this site cleaned up. We've asked PPG
Industries directly to clean up the wasteland they created and protect
the health of the people who live and work in this community. But so
far none of the people with the power to clean up this site have been
able to feel the same sense of urgency that I feel living blocks away
from it. So ICO and NRDC are asking the federal court to get the job
done."
tried everything else," said Ellen Wright, a leader of ICO who has
lived in the area of the former PPG complex for 43 years. "We've asked
every governor and every Department of Environmental Protection
commissioner since 1989 to get this site cleaned up. We've asked PPG
Industries directly to clean up the wasteland they created and protect
the health of the people who live and work in this community. But so
far none of the people with the power to clean up this site have been
able to feel the same sense of urgency that I feel living blocks away
from it. So ICO and NRDC are asking the federal court to get the job
done."
A byproduct of the
chromate chemical production facility housed on the site 50 years ago,
hexavalent chromium is toxic to humans and animals. PPG itself sampled
soil and groundwater and reported elevated levels - some more than
2,500 times the state clean-up standard - of the toxic chemical
throughout the site. Tests also reveal that chromium contamination has
migrated off the site to surrounding areas, including inside homes, and
schools in the densely populated African American and Latino community.
It will continue to spread until the site is cleaned up.
chromate chemical production facility housed on the site 50 years ago,
hexavalent chromium is toxic to humans and animals. PPG itself sampled
soil and groundwater and reported elevated levels - some more than
2,500 times the state clean-up standard - of the toxic chemical
throughout the site. Tests also reveal that chromium contamination has
migrated off the site to surrounding areas, including inside homes, and
schools in the densely populated African American and Latino community.
It will continue to spread until the site is cleaned up.
"This
is a community like any other, where people live, work and raise
families," Al Huang, NRDC environmental justice director. "Polluters
should not be allowed to treat it like a toxic waste dump. Instead PPG
should begin an immediate clean-up, which will not only protect
people's health, but also create jobs in this burdened neighborhood."
is a community like any other, where people live, work and raise
families," Al Huang, NRDC environmental justice director. "Polluters
should not be allowed to treat it like a toxic waste dump. Instead PPG
should begin an immediate clean-up, which will not only protect
people's health, but also create jobs in this burdened neighborhood."
Exposure
to this type of chromium has been found, in human and animal studies,
to cause cancer, respiratory problems, kidney and liver damage,
chromium ulcers, and nasal septum perforations, as well as pregnancy
and delivery complications for women. A study found that Jersey City
residents living closer to contaminated sites have significantly higher
incidence of lung cancer than those who live further away.
to this type of chromium has been found, in human and animal studies,
to cause cancer, respiratory problems, kidney and liver damage,
chromium ulcers, and nasal septum perforations, as well as pregnancy
and delivery complications for women. A study found that Jersey City
residents living closer to contaminated sites have significantly higher
incidence of lung cancer than those who live further away.
"Hexavalent
chromium is an extremely dangerous chemical and should not be allowed
anywhere near a residential neighborhood," said Jennifer Sass, NRDC
senior scientist. "The fact that many people in this community have
been exposed to it for their entire lives is reckless and unnecessary.
PPG must do the right thing and completely, promptly and permanently
remove this toxic chemical from the community."
chromium is an extremely dangerous chemical and should not be allowed
anywhere near a residential neighborhood," said Jennifer Sass, NRDC
senior scientist. "The fact that many people in this community have
been exposed to it for their entire lives is reckless and unnecessary.
PPG must do the right thing and completely, promptly and permanently
remove this toxic chemical from the community."
NRDC works to safeguard the earth--its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. We combine the power of more than three million members and online activists with the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to ensure the rights of all people to the air, the water, and the wild.
(212) 727-2700LATEST NEWS
Criminal Corporations Are Not People, But Trump Just Pardoned One Anyway
"If you're a corporation in a favored industry, you can break the law. You can get caught. You can be prosecuted and sentenced with a $100 million fine, and it doesn't matter," said one consumer advocate.
Apr 03, 2025
In what could be a U.S. first, President Donald Trump last week pardoned a criminal corporation, a move that largely flew under the proverbial radar amid his pardon spree for white-collar criminals including at least one of his supporters.
On March 28, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; company co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed; and former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
The company and the four men hads each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate" anti-money laundering program, as required by law. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice sentenced BitMEX to a fine of $100 million, while the executives were sentenced to criminal probation and ordered to pay civil fines.
While experts noted that Trump acted within his rights to pardon the corporation, there is no known precedent for a president taking such action.
Trump's corporate pardon sends a clear message: “If you’re a corporation in a favored industry, you can break the law. You can get caught. You can be prosecuted and sentenced with a $100 million fine, and it doesn’t matter”
[image or embed]
— Rick Claypool (@rickclaypool.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Noting the U.S. Supreme Court's highly controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed corporate personhood and the dubious notion that unlimited outside spending on political campaigns is free speech—Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler toldThe Intercept that "while we have seen the rise of a trend of treating corporations as persons in other areas of law, we haven't seen that so far in the area of pardoning."
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and preeminent pardons expert, wrote for The Hill on Tuesday that the BitMEX pardons send the message that "companies involved in financial crimes don't have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known."
"BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors," Wehle added. "The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November."
"The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people."
Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor specializing in corporate crime and punishment, told The Intercept that the BitMEX pardons are part of a wider pattern of impunity under Trump, who "now seems to be systematically pardoning corporate malefactors left and right without respect, really, to any real serious consideration about the merits of the cases [or] the larger policy implications of issuing these pardons."
As the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen recently noted, "The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn, or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office."
Beneficiaries include companies owned or led by Trump donors or allies, including private prison giant GEO Group; Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America; crypto firms Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood; and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"Trump's corporate pardons show the president's true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump's corruption," Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool said last week. "Trump's soft-on-corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America's consumers, workers, and communities."
Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added that the Trump administration's "effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease, and more preventable death."
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Senate Budget Plan Kicks Working Class in the Face, Hands Billions Upon Billions to the Rich
"No parliamentary tricks will change the fact that Trump, Musk, and his allies in Congress are trying to give a huge handout to the ultrawealthy while forcing the rest of us to foot the bill," wrote one watchdog.
Apr 03, 2025
Watchdogs and other critics swiftly denounced a budget blueprint unveiled by Senate Republicans on Wednesday that endeavors to get the GOP one step closer to delivering additional spending and trillions in tax cuts desired by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Observers are also condemning Republicans' plans to skirt the Senate parliamentarian and use a controversial gimmick to make an extension of provisions from Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act look "free"—even the cost of extending those cuts would be nearly $4 trillion over 10 years, and the Senate proposal includes a total of $5.3 trillion in tax cuts.
"Let's be clear: Trump and his allies in Congress are cooking the books in broad daylight. They don't want Americans to know that their scam of a tax bill, which gives trillions in giveaways to their billionaire and corporate donors, costs over $5 trillion," said David Kass, the executive director of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), in a statement on Wednesday.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, referenced Trump's billionaire adviser Elon Musk when declaring that "Republicans have chosen to prioritize the Trump-Musk agenda of picking the pockets of everyday people to shower billionaires with tax giveaways."
The Senate budget blueprint would increase the country's debt limit by $5 trillion and permanently extend tax cuts passed through Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, according to NPR.
Extending those tax cuts would primarily benefit the wealthy. According to a 2024 analysis from the Tax Policy Center, households making about $450,000 or more a year would receive nearly half of the benefits of extending key provisions of Trump's 2017 tax cuts.
According to a February report from ATF, the wealthiest Republicans on tax writing panels could save themselves millions through extending these cuts, particularly by keeping in place a higher estate tax exemption.
The Senate budget blueprint includes the $4.5 trillion tax plan passed by the House of Representatives in February, according to NPR. The House plan is crafted so the only way to achieve the requirements of the budget resolution is to enact steep cuts to Medicaid. The budget resolution also makes cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) all but certain.
Sharon Parrott, the president of the nonpartisan research organization the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, framed the Senate budget plan like this: "Congress is speeding down a path to a deeply harmful budget and tax 'reconciliation' bill that showers tax cuts on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations—and pays for it in part by raising healthcare and food costs through cuts in Medicaid and SNAP, increasing hardship and leaving millions without health coverage."
In order to move the legislation forward, Senate Republicans are planning on bypassing the Senate parliamentarian—who has sway over whether legislation can be sped up through the filibuster-free reconciliation process—on a crucial budgeting matter, according to Wednesday reporting from The New York Times.
By asserting that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, can decide the cost of legislation Republicans are angling not to get the parliamentarian's sign-off on their claim that extending the tax cuts will be free, per the Times.
The GOP is attempting to make the tax cut extension appear free by using the "current policy" baseline rather than the "current law" baseline. One expert who spoke to the Timescompared it to "taking an expensive weeklong vacation and then assuming you can spend an extra $1,000 per day forever since you are no longer staying at the Plaza."
A trio of experts writing for the Center for American Progress wrote that the approach is unprecedented in the past five decades since the Congressional Budget Office was formed and lawmakers acted within the current budget framework.
"Don't be fooled: the only way Senate Republicans can pay for their tax cuts to the wealthy is by taking a chainsaw to Medicaid, school lunches for kids, and driving up the cost of groceries and housing," said the executive director of the watchdog Accoutable.US, Tony Carrk, on Wednesday. "The math doesn't add up, and no parliamentary tricks will change the fact that Trump, Musk, and his allies in Congress are trying to give a huge handout to the ultrawealthy while forcing the rest of us to foot the bill."
Republicans narrowly control both chambers of Congress. According to Politico, the Senate will vote as soon as Thursday to consider the blueprint, which if adopted, would allow the House to try to adopt it before breaking for a two week recess.
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Capitalism Eating Itself by Fueling Climate Mayhem, Warns Capitalist
If humanity stays on current course, warns top insurer, the "financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable."
Apr 03, 2025
A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels.
According to GüntherThallinger, a former top executive at Germany's branch of the consulting giant McKinsey & Company and currently a board member of Allianz SE, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, the climate crisis is on a path to destroy capitalism as we know it.
"We are fast approaching temperature levels—1.5C, 2C, 3C—where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many" of the risks associated with the climate crisis, Thallinger writes in a recent post highlighted Thursday by The Guardian.
"Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
With "entire regions becoming uninsurable," he continues, the soaring costs of rebuilding and the insecurity of investments "threaten the very foundation of the financial sector," which he describes as " a climate-induced credit crunch" that will reverberate across national economies and globally.
"This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry," he warns. "The economic value of entire regions—coastal, arid, wildfire-prone—will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like."
Commenting on the Guardian's coverage of Thallinger's declaration, Dan Taylor, a senior lecturer in social and political thought at the Open University, said, "Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
While climate scientists, experts, and activists for decades have issued warning after warning of the threats posed by the burning of coal, oil, and gas and humanity's consumption of products derived from fossil fuels, the insurance industry has been the arm of capitalism most attuned to the lurking dangers.
"Here go the radical leftist insurance companies again," said David Abernathy, professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College, in a caustic response to Thallinger's latest warnings.
Despite their understanding of the threat, however, the world's insurers have primarily aimed to have it both ways, participating in the carnage by continuing to insure fossil fuel projects and underwriting expansion of the industry while increasingly attempting to offset their exposure to financial losses by changing policy agreements and lobbying governments for ever-increasing protections and preferable regulatory conditions.
In the post, self-published to LinkedIn last week, Thallinger—who has over many years lobbied for a more sustainable form of capitalism and led calls for a net-zero framework for corporations and industries—warned of the growing stress put on the insurance market worldwide by extreme weather events—including storms, floods, and fires—that ultimately will undermine the ability of markets to function or governments to keep pace with the costs:
There is no way to "adapt" to temperatures beyond human tolerance. There is limited adaptation to megafires, other than not building near forests. Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill. And as temperatures continue to rise, adaptation itself becomes economically unviable.
Once we reach 3°C of warming, the situation locks in. Atmospheric energy at this level will persist for 100+ years due to carbon cycle inertia and the absence of scalable industrial carbon removal technologies. There is no known pathway to return to pre-2°C conditions. (See: IPCC AR6, 2023; NASA Earth Observatory: "The Long-Term Warming Commitment")
At that point, risk cannot be transferred (no insurance), risk cannot be absorbed (no public capacity), and risk cannot be adapted to (physical limits exceeded). That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.
In an interview earlier this year, Thallinger explained that failure to act on the crisis of a rapidly warming planet is not just perilous for humanity and natural systems but doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.
"The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation," Thallinger said in February. "Extreme heat, storms, wildfires, floods, and billions in economic damage occur each year. In 2024, insured natural catastrophe losses surpassed $140 billion, marking the fifth straight year above $100 billion."
"Transitioning to a net-zero economy is not just about sustainability," he continued, "it is a financial and operational necessity to avoid a future where climate shocks outpace our ability to recover, straining governments, businesses, and households. Without decisive action, we risk crossing a threshold where adaptation is no longer possible, and the costs—human and financial—become unimaginable."
Thallinger's solution to the crisis is not to subvert the capitalist system by transitioning the world to an economic system based on shared resources, communal ownership, or a more enlightened egalitarian response. Instead, he proposes that a "reformed" capitalism is the solution, writing, "Capitalism must now solve this existential threat."
Calling for a reduction of emissions and a rapid scale-up of green energy technologies is the path forward, he argues, asking readers to understand "this is not about saving the planet," but rather "saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilization itself can continue to operate."
This disconnect was not lost on astute observers, including Antía Casted, a senior researcher at the Sir Michael Marmot Institute of Health Equity, who suggested concern over Thallinger's prescription.
"It would be fine if [the climate crisis] destroyed civilization and maintained capitalism," Casted noted. "They just need to find a way for capitalism to work without people."
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