Thanks I am happy about this having lived in NJ all my life. It really is the garden state and can be / is so beautiful

Welcome to Stinky Stadium!

Great! Which park can I get my super powers from?

Superfun Sites

Well, it depends on the super powers you seek my friend. Shall we travel to each park and discuss your potential future? Please note that with super powers comes super responsibility.

I wish to throw slippers like Hawkeye shoots arrows please. And flight.

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Central Park of Morris County seems to inspire my daughter into running around until she passes out.

To me that's a super power.

..and this apartment complex in Somerville.

There’s a soccer pitch in Orange NJ that used to be the site of a radium factory. I’d never let my kids play there.

Only way to do that is the hard way: become a grandmother, then the power of La Chancla will come to you

Explains The Toxic Avenger movie

Apartments, solar field for a community solar project, and "green seam" walking paths. Kind of hits all the needs of a community, totally making use of an otherwise unusable site.

I would love to know what's involved in cleaning up superfund sites. Is it actually cleaned, or is the whole thing sealed in an impermeable membrane and paved over?

Where do they move the trash from the landfills to?

> Is it actually cleaned, or is the whole thing sealed in an impermeable membrane and paved over?

If you read the superfund documents for most sites, it's the latter.

NJ couldn't even get the Passaic River cleanup right. They're dredging about half of the contaminated soil and then dumping some clean soil on top, instead of just removing all of the poisonous muck altogether.

I'm cool with most commercial and recreational projects being built on brownfields, but I strongly question any dwellings. Down the way, by where I used to live in Somerville, they also built apartments called Parc View (or something like that) on an old EPA site that used to manufacture airplanes for WWII. When we bought our house near this site, we had the ground tested to be sure.

Where I used to live in Marlboro, another such site (and much bigger) known as Burnt Fly Bog was extremely contaminated, with reports of cancer and other ailments coming from residents of near that site. I wouldn't be surprised to hear in 20-40 years, hearing of an uptick of cancer from select apartments built on or near these sites.

Look no farther than Toms River

Why were so many allowed in the first place is this Regan’s fault

Great point. By the time residents get cancer, the politicians will be dead and the developers will be bankrupt. Once again leaving the tax payers holding the bag. But yay luxury condos !!!

Yup. NJ manufacturing peaked in the 80s 🙄

I was semi joking, wow

(Why is this being downvoted, my wow was literally in awe ya goofs)

In my 18 years in nj ive heard of 2 schools built on sites they should not be. Idk if i trust the state to clean up properly but times have changed and im speaking out of my ass.

Yup. Fourth smallest state by land area in the country but most superfund sites, especially in proximity to where the majority of people live here. But any time the stereotype of us being a polluted mess comes up this sub falls all over itself to excuse it

You have lymphoma

I bet it gets glowing reviews.

While I don't know the answer to that, I know that NJ burns a lot of garbage now in plants like Covanta. There is one in Newark near the Turnpike (the 3 blue smoke stacks). They generate electricity from the process.

100%. Lots of these places were also turned into fields which use tires for the turf fill …. Ever read about how goalies in soccer have extremely high rates of cancer?

I used to coach and play on one of these sites. Same take as you now. Even if not the sites themselves the majority of turf fill uses rubber and welp

https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19538500/artificial-turf-cancer-risk/

The latter. The good ol kick the can down the road

Yeah, my understanding of the site (and I'm going back a number of years to the planning board meetings for the development) basically broke the site into two parts, one that acted as the landfill, and the other that was more open space where dumping occurred of mainly construction debris and whatnot.

I am hopeful that standards for developing on sites like this have improved since the early 2000s and 1990s. I say hopeful because I can't say 100% yes, because I don't know what the standards were back then, but for this site, with cutting it in half, and then remediation efforts on the residential portion, removing fill, adding screens, and capping entirely, outside of radioactive waste, exposure potential is practically zero.

And the areas that still are functioning landfill are not even being disturbed, but for some roads to access the solar panels. The panels won't even be in the ground, they're sitting on top of the lawn essentially, with ballast of course.

I understand concern with it, but it comes down to either using or not using the site. Exclude the fact that it was a landfill and it's a great location between two major thoroughfares to travel in all directions. I believe the LSRP process the DEP utilizes now is much more effective at monitoring remediation efforts.

Also, I'm pretty sure half the units are for ownership too, which IMO is better than just offering rentals. Giving folks an opportunity to get equity is always a good thing.

They don't. Somerville's landfill continues to operate and they're putting solar panels over top of it without the need to drill down into it.

That's great man. You're welcome to live there if you want.

They should inscribe this on the back of the headstones of everyone who died of cancer playing in these dumps as kids.

So in your mind, is it just undevelopable land in perpetuity? Would you put it on the same level as John's Manville and American Cyanamid? You raised a point and I felt there needed to be some clarification, because it isn't so cut and dried.

So yeah, just in general, are you opposed to building on top of contaminated sites blanketly? And if that's the case it's obviously fine, I just like to know where someone is coming from when they say things.

I hope I get an opportunity to steal this from you sometime, that's fantastic.

NJ is definitely polluted. America was built on the back of NJ industry. NJ has not begin given its just due in regard to the hundreds of sites that are essentially unusable at this point, and it's a shame because there is a growing dearth of land in proximity to places people work.

To the OC of this chain, cleanups vary from site to site. Sometimes there's digs. Sometimes there's monitoring and capping. It really depends on what's there. If it's buried household waste, essentially, capping it and preventing it from being disturbed, placing monitoring wells downstream to monitor for any impacts to groundwater, you kind of cover all the bases.

And that's a simplistic recap, but at the end of the day you identify what's there, identify if and where it's going, and from there you determine the course of action.

I think cleanup and environmental issues have come a very long way since the 80s and 90s. Or I hope. God, I hope.

Sure. To me, I would never live on land that was once industrial (specifically chemical or toxic) or used as a garbage dump. Somewhere down the line in homeownership, basements seep water, pipes leach, sewage backs up, and old crap from yesteryear comes back to haunt you. I don't trust anyone from the 80s, 90s, or today truly knows how to remediate everything and I want nothing to do with land like that. Like I said, commercial purposes is fine, but I would never want it for housing. At the very least, transparency is key. Disclosing the land's history to perspective buyers is important for their peace of mind.

>I just like to know where someone is coming from when they say things.

I'm coming from a guy who grew up in the 80s/90s in an area that was near questionable land use. I'm coming from a place where people all around our area were getting sick and wondering why the lot by my old development never grew anything despite being surrounded by woods (spoiler: it used to be a junk yard.) I'm now scratching my head as to how my mom got the kind of cancer she has now. I think it's unfortunate but the polluted land we used for industrial crap needs a lot of time to heal. There's no easy solution, but in any case, I do my homework and will never live in such a place.

station park is super fun! thanks cyanoacrylate!

A reputation that took a good part of the 20th Century to burnish...destroyed!

In Boonton they tore down alll the buildings, then excavated down about twenty feet and removed all the soil from the old EF Drew Chemical plant. They then backfilled everything and built a Walmart.

Wait, are you being sarcastic ? Am i supposed to have the history of NJ stamped on my ass?

I went to Colonia High School and all I got was this increased risk of developing a brain tumor.

I'll never forget reading a headline as a kid that NJ had gotten down to 99% water contamination. It was a big accomplishment!