Janet Tauro

If Gov. Chris Christie won’t stand up and fight to keep toxic waste from hydraulic fracturing out of New Jersey’s drinking water and off our roadways, the New Jersey Legislature will have to step up to the plate.

The bipartisan majority of state senators and Assembly members who voted to ban fracking waste from New Jersey must stand by their vote, and place the protection of New Jersey’s water and residents first. They need to stick together and override Christie’s veto of a bill (S-1041/A-2108) that would have prohibited the discharge, processing or storage of fracking waste in the state.

Fracking is a process increasingly used by the fossil-fuel extraction industry to release underground natural gas. It requires mixing millions of gallons of water consisting of a chemical cocktail of up to 700 ingredients such as benzene, methyl-benzene, and formaldehyde. Many of the chemicals employed in the process are poison to our bodies. They can disrupt the endocrine system and are linked to cancer and other known health problems.

This purposely chemically contaminated water is blasted into the ground, fracturing the earth to release underground gas. Gas is not the only substance that comes to the surface — millions of gallons of fracking wastewater, carcinogenic heavy metals and radioactive isotopes are brought to the surface, too. New Jersey’s treatment plants are not set up to handle wastewater and sludge from hydraulic fracturing.

These harmful substances also can seep into groundwater. While not being done in New Jersey today, some states use fracking waste as a deicer for roadways in winter and to stabilize road dust. This creates another easy pathway for contaminating waterways.

It’s a safe bet that New Jerseyans do not want fracking waste in their drinking water, rivers and bays, and no parent would want to unwittingly serve it to their child.

Christie would have us believe that we don’t have to worry about fracking waste because New Jersey doesn’t produce any. That’s a thin excuse not to pass the ban. Fracking waste from Pennsylvania has been dumped here in the past, and even though the state Department of Environmental Protection contacted those companies and advised them not to do it again, there is mounting pressure for more to come this way if neighboring states say no.

And the pressure will only increase. Pennsylvania fracking is expanding. Moratoriums on fracking in New York and the Delaware River watershed are tenuous at best. The federal government has found significant shale gas deposits in a rock formation that cuts across New Jersey from Trenton and Lambertville all the way to northern Bergen and Passaic counties.

Without a New Jersey law banning the acceptance of waste from fracking, there is nothing to prevent companies from attempting to, and successfully, dumping it here in the future.

Christie claims the bill violates the interstate commerce clause, which forbids New Jersey from setting different disposal regulations for out-of-state companies. He is wrong. The bill was specifically written to ban the processing of any fracking waste in New Jersey now or in the future, regardless of its origin. Also, the commerce clause has a public health exemption.

That’s why the bill has passed constitutional muster with the Legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services, and our state senators and Assembly members deemed it legally, and morally, worthy of their votes not just once, but twice. However, they now need to take immediate action for a third time to reverse the governor’s ill-advised veto.

This isn’t the first time other states and industries dumped on New Jersey. During the 1980s, Gov. Tom Kean signed legislation banning the dumping of sewage waste off the Jersey Shore. He understood that doing the right thing trumps all when he said, “Our children and grandchildren deserve the right to live and work in this state free from the fears of poisons in their air, water, and earth.”

And those are words to govern by.

Janet Tauro is New Jersey board chair of Clean Water Action and founding member of GRAMMES (Grandmothers, Mothers, and More for Energy Safety).