How NL Industries and Corporate America Turned a Jersey Shore Park into a Toxic Wasteland.

A Playground Fenced Off

Imagine if you will, a community built along the water. The shore of Raritan Bay in Old Bridge and Sayreville, New Jersey, was a recreational hub—a place for fishing, swimming, and sunbathing, bordered by residential homes. But underneath the sand and along the seawall, a toxic legacy was hiding in plain sight.

For nearly half a century, this idyllic setting was treated as a garbage dump. The waste wasn’t just household trash; it was lead furnace slag, discarded battery casings, and other industrial refuse laced with lead, arsenic, and chromium.

The poison eventually leached into the soil, sediment, and water. In 2009, federal health agencies declared the area a “public health hazard”. The simple joys of living by the water were stolen from the community. Permanent fences were erected, and signs were posted, warning residents against the very activities that defined their home—no swimming, no fishing, no sunbathing. A community’s backyard had become a toxic, fenced-off monument to corporate negligence.

The Corporate Playbook: Profit from Pollution

This environmental disaster was the direct result of a calculated business strategy employed for decades by NL Industries, Inc., and a vast network of other corporations.

1. Generate Toxic Waste: From the 1920s through 1975, NL Industries operated a secondary lead smelting facility in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The profitable business of processing scrap batteries and other lead materials created a massive and dangerous byproduct: furnace slag and battery casings contaminated with heavy metals.
2. Find the Cheapest Disposal Method: Instead of investing in safe, responsible disposal—which would have cut into profits—NL Industries hired a trucking company to simply haul the waste away.
3. Treat the Environment as a Free Landfill: The chosen dumpsite was not a secure, contained facility. It was the public’s shoreline. The toxic slag and battery casings were dumped in wetlands, used to construct a 2,200-foot seawall, and spread along the jetty at the Cheesequake Creek Inlet. The environment and the community were forced to absorb the true costs of NL’s business operations.
4. Create a Web of Complicity: NL Industries was not alone. The Department of Justice complaint lists dozens of major American corporations—including DuPont, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, and Rio Tinto—who allegedly arranged for their own waste to be disposed of at NL’s facility, making them part of a chain of toxicity that ended on the beaches of Raritan Bay. Even the local government, Old Bridge Township, became a responsible party when it purchased the contaminated seawall property in 1983 with full knowledge that lead waste had been deposited there.

A Cascade of Consequences: A Toxic Legacy

The long-term impact of this corporate playbook has been catastrophic for the community and the environment.

Environmental Degradation

The contamination is immense. The EPA estimates the site contains approximately

11,000 cubic yards of slag and other source material, along with an additional 80,000 cubic yards of lead-contaminated soils and sediments. This poison has had “adverse ecological effects to natural resources such as aquatic, terrestrial and avian species”. The very ecosystem of the bay was damaged by the illegal dumping.

Public Health and Economic Ruin

The primary threat is to human health. Lead is a powerful neurotoxin, and the site was declared a public health hazard to protect residents from exposure. The economic cost of this negligence is staggering.

Table data sourced from the Consent Decree.

This massive sum doesn’t even include the $32.2 million in cleanup costs that U.S. taxpayers had already paid as of May 2023. The relentless pursuit of profit by private industry has left the public with a colossal bill for cleanup and restoration.

Analysis: A System Designed for This

The story of the Raritan Bay Slag Superfund Site is a classic indictment of an industrial capitalist model that systematically externalizes costs. For nearly 50 years, it was more profitable for NL Industries and its partners to use the public’s environment as a free sewer than to pay for responsible waste management. The consequences—a poisoned shoreline, sick wildlife, a public health hazard, and a nine-figure cleanup bill—were pushed onto the community and the taxpayer.

This is the predictable result of an economic system that views environmental protection as a barrier to profit rather than a fundamental corporate duty. The decades of inaction and the immense difficulty in holding the dozens of responsible parties accountable demonstrate a regulatory framework that has historically struggled to keep pace with corporate malfeasance.

Dodging Accountability: The Price of Impunity

After a nearly 50-year delay since the pollution ended, a settlement was finally reached. However, the terms of the Consent Decree reveal the hollow nature of modern corporate accountability.

Despite agreeing to a total settlement of over $151 million, the settling corporations, including NL Industries, “do not admit any liability… arising out of the transactions or occurrences alleged in the complaint”.

For a price, the corporations are allowed to walk away without ever admitting fault for the decades of environmental destruction and the creation of a public health hazard. The fine, massive as it is, becomes just another cost of doing business, a financial penalty decoupled from any moral or legal admission of guilt. Furthermore, the settlement holds no individual executives or decision-makers responsible for the actions that led to the pollution, allowing them to remain shielded by the corporate veil.

Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change

The Superfund law, or CERCLA, is the critical tool that made this settlement possible, providing a mechanism to force polluters to pay for the messes they create. The $151 million settlement will provide vital funds to continue the cleanup (87.6%) and begin restoring the natural resources that were lost (12.4%).

But this case demonstrates that true justice requires more. It requires swift and decisive enforcement so that communities do not have to live with toxic threats for half a century. It demands that we strengthen our environmental laws to prevent corporations from treating fines as a simple business expense. Ultimately, it requires a shift toward a system that holds individual corporate leaders personally accountable for the destruction caused in their pursuit of profit.

Conclusion: A Story of a System, Not an Exception

The Raritan Bay Slag Superfund site is a physical scar left by an economic system that for too long valued profit above the health of our communities and our planet. The mountain of lead-laced slag and battery casings littering a New Jersey shoreline is a monument to an era of unchecked industrial greed.

The nine-figure settlement is not a sign of a system that works, but rather a receipt for the catastrophic failure of a system that allowed this to happen in the first place. As long as corporations can poison our environment for decades and then purchase a clean slate without ever admitting they did anything wrong, this story will not be an exception. It will remain the predictable, toxic rule.

Disclaimer: All factual claims in this article are derived from the public Complaint (Case 3:24-cv-08946) and Consent Decree (Case 3:24-cv-08946) filed in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey on September 4, 2024. Sources

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/09/10/2024-20336/notice-of-lodging-of-proposed-consent-decree-under-the-comprehensive-environmental-response

https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-proposes-settlement-provide-151-million-cleanup-raritan-bay-slag-superfund-site

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup&id=0200390#bkground