A Camden Judge Just Approved $2.5 Billion for ‘Forever Chemicals’ — and Two Sites Are Right Here

In a federal courthouse a few blocks from the Delaware River, Chief U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb approved a pair of settlements that will send New Jersey up to $2.5 billion over the next quarter-century to clean up decades of PFAS contamination. It is one of the largest environmental settlements in the state’s history, and it ends a legal fight that began back in 2019. For South Jersey taxpayers, the details are worth reading closely — because two of the four industrial sites at the center of this case are in our backyard.

Let’s start with the plain facts. PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the so-called “forever chemicals” — are a family of compounds used for decades in manufacturing. They don’t break down. They turn up in drinking water, in soil, in the blood of people who never worked a day in a chemical plant. New Jersey sued the companies responsible, and after six years, the case has resolved.

The numbers

Under the terms Judge Bumb approved, 3M will pay between $400 million and $450 million. DuPont and its related companies — the corporate family that now includes Chemours and Corteva — will pay $875 million into funds to restore natural resources and repair drinking-water systems, with the DuPont entities on the hook for an additional $1.2 billion in remediation commitments. Add it up and you reach the roughly $2.5 billion headline, paid out over the next 25 years.

The local part

The settlements cover four significant industrial sites. Two are in North Jersey — Pompton Lakes Works in Passaic County, and the Parlin site in Sayreville, Middlesex County. But the other two are ours. The Repauno site sits in Greenwich Township, Gloucester County. And Chambers Works spans Pennsville and Carneys Point Township in Salem County — a sprawling chemical complex that has been part of the economic and environmental fabric of Salem County for more than a century. If you live in Salem or Gloucester County, that is not an abstraction. That is the ground under communities where the questions about what’s in the water are not new and have not always been answered.

A $2.5 billion commitment is only as good as the follow-through. The residents of Greenwich Township and Carneys Point have every right to expect the dollars tied to their communities are spent cleaning up their communities.Grace Monroe

There is a fairness principle worth naming, too. For years, the cost of this contamination was borne by the public — by water utilities passing along treatment costs, by homeowners, by anyone who ever wondered what was seeping into the groundwater near an old plant. This settlement shifts a large share of that cost back onto the companies that made and used the chemicals. That is, at its core, what these cases are supposed to do: make the polluter pay, not the neighbor. The legal battle is over. The cleanup is not. For South Jersey — for Salem County especially — the real test starts now, in the slow, unglamorous work of turning a court order into clean water. I’ll be watching where the money lands, and so should you.

Based on reporting from the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, The Philadelphia Inquirer, WHYY, and NJBIA.