Some members of New Jersey’s business and industrial community said they understood the need for enforcement, but urged officials to consider a tempered approach.

“Overzealous enforcement or looking for ‘gotchas’ in a morass of sometimes complex regulations can cause unnecessary burdens on well-intended companies that are already challenged to keep up with the high cost of doing business in the state,” Michele Siekerka, president and chief executive of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said in a statement. “In those cases, it’s important that environmental regulators provide the option of compliance assistance to help allow for practical and timely resolutions to issues, rather than inhibiting the growth of New Jersey’s job creators.”

Efforts on Wednesday to reach representatives of the property owners or companies that were once on those sites were largely unsuccessful. But John Deull, the owner of Deull Fuel Company in Atlantic City, said he was surprised to be named in the Atlantic City lawsuit. In a Facebook post, he added that he and his wife had spent nearly $2 million over 27 years on lawyers, environmental consultants, testing and other remediation efforts.

“There is nothing left to extract from me,” Mr. Deull wrote, “except my property on the site and the life from my body.”

New Jersey’s reputation has been molded by industry, with a horizon that has long been dotted with factories and smokestacks. The state was once derided for its vast acreage of garbage dumps and for the fires that would ignite on a heavily polluted stretch of the Passaic River.

Now, long after much of that industry has faded and extensive work to recover from the pollution has been done, the state continues to contend with the scars left behind. On the Passaic River in Newark, for instance, it has required a massive undertaking to remove a century’s worth of pollution, costing over $1 billion to dredge sediment laden with chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals and other contaminants.