New Jersey...and how it got that way: September

Posted December 20, 2007 by Brett Avery, John Hasse

Situation: Unchecked development threatens to engulf the state’s remaining open space, while the continued generation of enormous amounts of garbage and toxic substances spells trouble for an already weakened environment.

Cause:  A manufacturing economy and growing population have degraded the state’s land, water, and air, while regulations to protect remaining resources have gone largely unheeded. Nearly three decades after Congress passed the law to fund cleanup of abandoned toxic waste sites, New Jersey tops the list of states with proposed and final Superfund sites (the state has 116, or one in every eleven in the nation).

Worse, according to 2003 figures compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, only six states generate more hazardous waste than New Jersey’s 1.24 million tons per year. All six are much larger than New Jersey, meaning we have the greatest concentration of the stuff in the United States. At the same time, household recycling rates have steadily declined from a peak of 45 percent in 1995 to barely above 30 percent in 2004, the most recent year for which numbers are available. Each day thousands of tons of waste that could be recycled are instead buried in landfills. We don’t have much land left for new landfills. Meanwhile, development swallows an estimated 50 acres a day.

how to Fix:

1. Embrace a “zero waste” lifestyle.  The average New Jersey resident generates 6.4 pounds of garbage a day, well above the national average of 4.4 pounds. That could be excused if we aggressively embraced recycling and land reclamation. But a decade after nearly achieving the state’s initial goal of recycling 50 percent of municipal (read: household) waste, we’ve slid down to nearly 30 percent. Our laziness has stuffed many of the state landfills close to capacity, leaving us to pay costly carting fees to dispose of about 20 percent of our waste in other states.

The Statewide Solid Waste Management Plan was revised last year in an effort to boost recycling. Considering the state’s relatively small size (7,417 square miles), we should support a state mandate of zero waste. We can follow the leads of entities with far more land that nonetheless have successfully reduced unnecessary waste:

• Nova Scotia (25,000 square miles) utilizes an aggressive beverage container deposit program (80 percent return/recycle rate), take-back programs for sensitive materials such as televisions, computers and toxic items, and a ban on dry recyclables (glass, newspaper, etc.) entering landfills. Estimates show such regulations save up to $167 million annually.
• Norway (125,000 square miles) taxes waste, collecting an average of $76 per metric ton when any of fourteen pollutants escape waste-incinerator smokestacks. It also taxes organic material entering landfills.
• Taiwan (14,400 square miles) reduced incinerated waste by instituting mandatory food recycling in 2006. (Twenty-five percent of household garbage was food waste.) The aim was to divert 4,500 tons of food waste to livestock feed and composting—thereby saving more than $70 million each year.

2. Acquire more open space. The state occupies about 4.8 million acres of land. Since 1961, when the Green Acres Program was inaugurated, about 597,000 acres have been protected. That brings the state’s portfolio of open space to 1.3 million acres, or 25 percent of its territory.

In May, a skirmish broke out in Trenton over how to fund land acquisitions. Corzine, loath to burden the state with more debt, designated $25 million in this year’s budget, a small percentage of typical annual spending, for stop-gap funding of the Garden State Preservation Trust. His goal was to delay for a year a referendum on $1.75 billion in bonds to replenish the fund over 30 years. His stated hope is that a lease arrangement for toll roads, the lottery, and other properties will fund the trust without borrowing.

The move didn’t sit well with environmental groups. They cite continuing research by John Hasse (an assistant professor at Rowan University, who specializes in land use geography, environmental planning, and spatial analysis) and Richard Lathrop (director of the Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis at Rutgers) that calculated a statewide daily loss of about 50 acres to development. That’s a tract the size of Hudson County every twenty months, or a Cape May County every decade. In the latest installment of a study (see chart, above) stretching back to the 1970s, Hasse and Lathrop determined that the number of acres developed by the 1990s (nearly 1.5 million) exceeded the number of forested acres (about 1.4 million). And that’s not counting the intervening six years of 50-acre-a-day losses.

A $1.75 billion nest egg spread over 30 years might protect 500,000 of the roughly 1.4 million open acres remaining.

3. Protect undeveloped land through legislation. Buying thousands of acres protects some land but fails to influence how surrounding acreage will be developed. Legislators can craft laws like the 2004 Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act, which limited development on about 850 acres that generate drinking water for more than 65 percent of residents.

Developers continue to attack that law from all angles, most recently with a suit filed against the state by house builder Kaplan Co., claiming the law constricts the construction of affordable housing. More than 100 other lawsuits have been filed against municipalities as a result of the Highlands Act. Part of the remedy is public pressure on homebuilders and other developers trying to get around such land-use laws. But officials also need to protect the greater interests of residents by crafting laws that tightly control development. Such laws can stress that growth is good, but unchecked growth (often at the benefit of the wealthy) damages all of us.

For more stories about: Corzine, Jon, Trenton, corruption, garbage, recycling, development, open space, land, Green Acres Program, Hudson County, Cape May County, Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act, Kaplan Co., Lathrop, Richard