People Unknowingly Drinking Hundreds of Unregulated Chemicals
DEP Admitted Flaws And Proposed A Far More Protective Alternative Over A Decade Ago
DEP is allowing politically powerful corporations to block much needed reforms
Last week, I filed a petition for rulemaking to force DEP to either finally implement major reforms to current drinking water protections DEP scientists recommended over a decade ago, or to explain to the public why their own recommended protections are no longer scientifically valid.
Today, I wrote to NJ Senate Environment Committee Chairman Bob Smith to urge him to conduct legislative oversight hearings to find out what became of DEP’s own recommended reforms (see letter below).
Those huge reforms were proposed under Corzine Administration DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson.
Jackson later led the Obama EPA to recommend the identical reforms on a national level.
The Jackson EPA clearly explained why the current approach to drinking water protections was seriously flawed, outlined the rationale for reforms, and found there would be huge public health benefits of those reforms:
“The current approach to drinking water protection is focused on a detailed assessment of each individual contaminant of concern and can take many years. This approach not only results in slow progress in addressing unregulated contaminants but also fails to take advantage of strategies for enhancing health protection cost‐effectively, including advanced treatment technologies that address several contaminants at once. The outlined vision seeks to use existing authorities to achieve greater protection more quickly and cost‐effectively.” ~~~ (US EPA, March 2010)
Very few people are aware of the fact that DEP documented the presence of over 500 unregulated chemicals in NJ’s drinking water.
I’ve been trying to warn the public and force DEP to adopt drinking water standards and treatment requirements for the last 15 years, see:
It currently takes several years for DEP to adopt drinking water standards for each individual chemical. One chemical!
During this delay, people are unknowingly and needlessly drinking hundreds of chemicals, many of which are likely to cause sickness, disease, and cancer. For the implications of this, recall that the Toms River cancer cluster was caused by unregulated chemicals in drinking water (and air).
Read the NJ DoH Toms River Cancer Cluster Report:
“The study found that prenatal exposure to two environmental factors in the past were associated with increased risk of leukemia in female children. These exposures were: 1) access to drinking water from the Parkway well field after the time that the well field was most likely to be contaminated, and 2) air pollutant emissions from the Ciba-Geigy chemical manufacturing plant.”
Current technology is available that can cost effectively remove virtually all of these chemicals.
That why DEP scientists recommended that every drinking water system install this treatment, known as activated carbon.
But DEP never followed through on these recommendations.
The private corporate water companies opposed and quietly killed those protections before the public even was aware of the problems of unregulated chemicals, the unknown health risks, and the availability of treatment technology to remove them.
The corporate polluters who are responsible for poisoning our drinking water joined this opposition, because they knew they would be forced to pick up the tab for this treatment technology.
DEP is allowing politically powerful corporations to block much needed reforms to establishing protections for our drinking water.
Further delay is intolerable. Contact Gov. Murphy, Senator Smith and your legislators to demand that DEP act.
The Biden EPA will never get around to doing this at the national level.
And the problems in NJ – the nation’s most densely populated state with the most Superfund sites (and 25 times more hazardous waste sites ) and a huge petro-chemical and pharmaceutical industrial complex – are far worse.
———- Original Message ———-
From: Bill WOLFE <>
To: senbsmith <SenBSmith@njleg.org>, sengreenstein <sengreenstein@njleg.org>, asmmckeon <asmmckeon@njleg.org>, “asmScharfenberger@njleg.org” <asmScharfenberger@njleg.org>
Cc: “shawn.latourette@dep.nj.gov” <shawn.latourette@dep.nj.gov>, “Sean.Moriarty@dep.nj.gov” <Sean.Moriarty@dep.nj.gov>, “kduhon@njleg.org” <kduhon@njleg.org>
Date: 09/04/2023 7:29 AM PDT
Subject: EPA/DEP Drinking Water Treatment based approach
Dear Chairman Smith:
NJ media recently reported on the presence of unregulated chemicals in NJ drinking water, many with unknown but suspected adverse health effects (for the implications of that, please recall that the Toms River cancer cluster was associated with an unregulated chemical in drinking water).
Accordingly, you might want to conduct Legislative oversight on what became of this important EPA drinking water regulatory reform initiative. It was former NJ DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson’s initiative at the Obama EPA and it parallels a prior NJ DEP scientific Report with very similar findings and recommendations:
“The current approach to drinking water protection is focused on a detailed assessment of each individual contaminant of concern and can take many years. This approach not only results in slow progress in addressing unregulated contaminants but also fails to take advantage of strategies for enhancing health protection cost‐effectively, including advanced treatment technologies that address several contaminants at once. The outlined vision seeks to use existing authorities to achieve greater protection more quickly and cost‐effectively.” ~~~ (US EPA, March 2010)
Details and petition for rulemaking to NJ DEP is here: