By South Jersey Times Editorial Board
Settlements of big environmental damage cases in New Jersey can boomerang for victims — all of us, really — of poisoned air, soil and water.
The foul taste of the “pennies-on-the-dollar” 2015 agreement between the state Department of Environmental Protection and ExxonMobil Corp. for a wide range of contamination across the state continues to linger.
DEP analysts claimed the company and its predecessors caused $8.9 billion in damages, but the settlement, brokered by the Christie administration, had the energy giant pay just $225 million to make the litigation disappear. It’s a rounding error in ExxonMobil’s profits, which were $11.4 billion in the first quarter of 2023.
Pragmatically, it’s likely DEP never could have proven the $8.9 billion figure, but the paltry settlement called into question the ability to remediate pollution linked to the former Mobil refinery in Greenwich Township and a neighboring storage site in Paulsboro. State experts put that cost at $80 million — more than a third of the entire state settlement. (Separately, ExxonMobil reached a $9.5 million settlement in 2019 to pay for pollution at a 1950s dumpsite in Paulsboro and East Greenwich Township.)
So, what to make of last week’s settlement in another case involving roughly the same stomping grounds as ExxonMobil’s in Gloucester County? Solvay Specialty Polymers, with a plant in West Deptford, will pay $393 million to deal with contamination from so-called “forever chemicals” that the facility formerly
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