The mercury among us: New Jersey neighborhoods fight toxic incinerators

E: The Environmental Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Will Nixon

Anne Parker, a retired school teacher, lives in what should be a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in Rahway, New Jersey. The curbs hold orange jack-o-lantern leaf bags, the sidewalks have cracked from the roots of stately sycamore trees, the brick or ranch-style houses have tricycles or basketball hoops in the driveways. There is even a pair of that famous suburban species, the plastic pink lawn flamingo.

But each time Parker sits in her kitchen breakfast nook, she feels sick. Through the web of tree branches in her backyard, she can see her newest neighbor five blocks away: the gray cement smokestack of the Union County Utility Authority (UCUA) incinerator with a crown of blinking red lights that wards off low-flying airplanes. Why it stands in the middle of an African-American neighborhood only 150 feet across the Rahway River from a youth center is a mystery of New Jersey's solid waste politics that Parker doesn't understand.

Parker and her neighbors have used many tactics and arguments to try to stop the incinerator from being built and then opening early in 1994. She has been arrested twice, once on a drizzly Earth Day when 15 protesters rowed across the brown river to trespass on incinerator land, and again in a winter snowstorm when eight people blocked garbage trucks from entering the driveway. But nothing has really worked--except for raising fears about mercury.

In July, the incinerator, which has a permit to release one ton of mercury per year into the local air, installed a new carbon injection system to catch more vapors in the smokestack. The mercury emissions will drop from the permitted level of 410 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 65 micrograms. This is the first facility in the country with this system," says Bryan Christensen, deputy executive director of UCUA. The county already collects batteries to be recycled, attacking one major source of mercury at the incinerator, and UCUA soon plans to collect fluorescent light bulbs, another great trouble maker. "From the beginning, we said we're going to build a state-of-the-art incinerator," Christensen insists.

New Jersey has no lack of toxic troubles. An industrial corridor of oil refineries, chemical plants and pharmaceutical companies runs through the northeastern shoulder of the state, mixing the old brick factories around Newark with the newer oil tank farms and sprawling white pipes and towers of the chemical plants. The industrial landscape picks up again towards Philadelphia on the western hip of the state. All told, New Jersey has more toxic air emissions per square mile than any other state in the country. And in 1994, mercury became the toxin du jour.

Mercury has a long history in New Jersey. In the 19th century, hat factories in Newark used mercury nitrate to help make rough fur into smooth felt. Amid the fumes and dust, workers suffered from mercurialism, nicknamed "haters' shakes," a hazard of the trade that also caused ulcerated gums, loose teeth, sickly breath, and in women, suppressed menstruation and miscarriages. Their children sometimes suffered rickets or mental defects. But the days of "mad haters" are long past. The new mercury threat arises from the vapors of coal-burning utilities, smelters and garbage incinerators that return to Earth much like acid rain to contaminate fish with methyl mercury, which can also be fatal to humans in large doses.

Since the late 80s, researchers have been finding this poison in supposedly pristine places, such as the 1,400 lakes of Ontario and the Florida Everglades, so from 1992 to 1993 the Academy of Natural Sciences went fishing in 55 lakes, reservoirs and rivers in New Jersey to measure for methyl mercury. Sure enough, they found the large predatory fish that collect this pollutant in their muscle tissue to be contaminated in 32 waterways. It's much harder, if not impossible, to find people harmed by eating this fish, but obviously the ecosystem is not in good health.

At first, the commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Robert Shinn, Jr., handled the news like James Watt. "I had a dream about this," he told some outdoor writers in March. "I thought that one of the biggest violators we have is really God, through the volcanoes and the gases that come up through the ocean, and about 40 to 65 percent of this mercury is His problem and I don't know how to deal with this." In July, the DEP finally warned anglers to limit their appetite for large mouth bass and chain pickerel, the two species with the most methyl mercury in the study. The general public should eat no more than eight ounces a week of them, the DEP advised, while pregnant women and young mothers should eat no more than eight ounces a month.

The NIMBYs of New Jersey have leapt on this news to ask why the state should permit any new coal-burning plants or incinerators. "This is more reason to implement a statewide moratorium on any new mercury producer," says Madelyn Hoffman of the Grass Roots Environmental Organization. Instead, the DEP has approved two new incinerators and granted permits for a coal-burning plant in a rural area across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.