Corporate Misconduct Case Study: New Jersey Galvanizing and Its Impact on the People of Newark

A Community Left in the Dark

For three consecutive years, a factory in Newark, New Jersey, handled significant quantities of nickel, a toxic chemical, without properly informing the public or the government as required by law. New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works, located on Haynes Avenue, repeatedly failed to file mandatory reports about its use of this substance.

This is a story about a community’s fundamental right to know what potential dangers exist in their own backyards.

Every day, families in Newark live, work, and send their children to school, all while crucial information about toxic chemical usage by local industries is withheld, leaving them unable to advocate for their own health and safety.

The Corporate Playbook: A Pattern of Secrecy

The actions of New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works reveal a clear and sustained pattern of failing to comply with cornerstone environmental regulations.

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) was passed for a simple reason: to give communities the information needed to prepare for and prevent chemical accidents and long-term health hazards.

For the reporting years 2021, 2022, and 2023, the company used amounts of nickel that exceeded the legal reporting thresholds. Yet, year after year, the July 1 deadline for filing these crucial reports came and went with no submission to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the State of New Jersey.

A Timeline of Non-Compliance

The failure to report for two of those years stretched for more than a full year past the deadline, a prolonged period during which regulators and the public were kept in the dark. This consistent failure points to a corporate culture that disregards its legal and social responsibilities in favor of operational convenience or secrecy.

A Cascade of Consequences: The Real-World Impact

Public Health & Safety at Risk

The failure to report toxic chemicals is not a victimless crime. Nickel is a known hazardous substance. By not filing Toxic Chemical Release Inventory reports, New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works deprived residents, first responders, and local health officials of critical data.

This information is vital for understanding potential environmental contamination, tracking public health trends, and preparing for emergencies like fires or spills where the presence of undisclosed chemicals could have catastrophic consequences. The community’s right to know was violated, stripping them of their ability to ask informed questions and demand accountability for their well-being.

A System Designed for This: Profit, Deregulation, and Power

This case is a troubling illustration of how our economic and regulatory systems often fail to protect people. The penalty issued to New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works was a mere $63,800 for three years of violations. For a manufacturing facility, this amount is often viewed not as a punishment, but as a minor cost of doing business—a small price to pay for years of non-compliance.

This outcome is a direct product of a neoliberal ideology that prioritizes corporate interests over public and environmental health.

Decades of deregulation and lax enforcement have created a landscape where companies can gamble with public safety, knowing that the financial consequences are often negligible. The system allows violations to persist for years before an inspection even occurs, and when it does, the penalties lack the teeth to force systemic change across the industry.

Dodging Accountability: How the Powerful Evade Justice

The settlement reached in this case is a masterclass in avoiding true accountability. As part of the agreement, New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works

neither admits nor denies the EPA’s factual allegations. This legal maneuver allows the company to pay the fine and move on without ever having to publicly acknowledge its wrongdoing.

There is no admission of guilt, no public apology to the community they endangered, and no individual executive is named or held personally responsible. The corporation as an entity pays the fine, which is tax-deductible in many cases, and the cycle continues. This is essentially just a legal transaction which sanitizes corporate negligence and ensures the powerful are shielded from meaningful consequences.

Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change

True justice requires more than a slap on the wrist. Preventing future cases like this demands systemic reform that shifts power from corporations to communities.

• Strengthening Regulations: We need regulations with mandatory minimum penalties that are scaled to a company’s revenue, making it truly painful to break the law. Fines must be a deterrent, not a business expense.
• Empowering Communities: Local community groups and environmental watchdogs should be given more resources and legal standing to sue polluting companies directly, bypassing slow-moving government agencies.
• Executive Accountability: We must pierce the corporate veil and hold individual executives criminally and financially liable for repeated environmental violations. When a CEO faces personal consequences, corporate culture will change overnight.

Conclusion: A Story of a System, Not an Exception

The case of New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works is not the story of a single “bad apple” company. It is a predictable outcome of an economic system designed to privatize profits while socializing the costs of environmental degradation and public health risks.

This legal document is a window into a much larger crisis where communities, particularly working-class and minority neighborhoods, are treated as sacrifice zones for corporate profit. Until we fundamentally restructure the rules to prioritize people over profit, stories like this will continue to be written, one toxic secret at a time.

All factual claims in this article were derived from the below Consent Agreement and Final Order in the matter of New Jersey Galvanizing and Tinning Works, Docket No. EPCRA-02-2025-4105, filed in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, on August 13, 2025.

You can view that above EPA consent agreement and final order by visiting the EPA’s website: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/F34D069EF63AC9C185258CE5007A356D/$File/NJGalvanzing254105CAFO.pdf