EXCESSIVE EXPOSURE—New Jerseyans are exposed to excessive toxic risks because industry and consumer product makers aren’t doing what they should to prevent toxic pollution—using less toxics in their products and processes—or to clean up the toxic waste they’ve already generated.

Reducing Risks Of Toxic Exposure

NJPIRG is launching a comprehensive effort to reduce the unnecessary risks of toxic exposure faced by all New Jerseyans. Toxic chemicals can have profound health impacts, causing cancer, harming our reproductive systems, interfering with our children’s development, damaging our nervous and respiratory systems. Our latest report, available on our website, found that New Jersey industries released over 12,800,000 pounds of these toxic chemicals to our air and water in 2004 alone.

Air and water emissions from industrial plants aren’t the only toxic threats New Jerseyans face: toxic sites fester for many years, waiting for clean up; consumer products contain hidden toxics, even though safer alternatives are available; and industrial plants continue to use unnecessarily hazardous ingredients and processes, placing the communities around them at risk from accidents or terrorist attacks.

Every one of these hazards can be reduced. If fully enacted, NJPIRG’s simple, yet comprehensive platform would significantly reduce New Jerseyans’ daily toxic exposure risks. Our platform is based on one fundamental principle: industry must take responsibility for the toxic risks it creates. Responsibility takes many forms: paying for the clean up of the toxic waste sites; figuring out feasible, inherently safer approaches to making products and adopting them; adding new pollution control technologies as they are developed.

This summer, NJPIRG will be working to a secure a pledge from every candidate running for the State Legislature that if elected, the candidate would support legislation enacting our platform. Enacting our platform would put New Jersey firmly on the path toward a toxics-free future.