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This would be a renewable resource for lead abatement funds, rather than a single dedication of money. This bill would encourage recycling while funding an important program to remove lead paint from homes and other buildings.

“This bill is win-win-win for New Jersey. It cleans up lead, gets rid of litter, and promotes recycling. We will have a long-term funding source to remove lead from drinking water, from our homes, and from our schools and communities. This bill will help prevent litter and stop bottles from clogging storm drains leading to pollution and flooding. It will also advance recycling since our state only currently recycles half of our plastic bottles. New Jersey environmentalists have long been advocating for a bottle bill to help promote recycling and reduce waste and pollution. This bill is a great way to do that while simultaneously helping to address the problem of lead in New Jersey.” said Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “The Sierra Club has been working on this legislation for the last ten years. This is one of the most important bills when it comes to not only protecting our children but also recycling and reducing waste.”

The money collected from these container deposits would go towards lead abatement. We need to get rid of lead paint from our homes and buildings. We also need to prevent and test for lead in our drinking water and the pipes that the water runs through. This includes replacing outdated pipes with lead or lead sodder in them. Removing hazardous lead is incredibly important because of how dangerous it is to people, especially children. There are already thousands of children being diagnosed with lead poisoning each year in New Jersey.

“Lead is a systemic issue that needs to be dealt with immediately; we can’t allow our children to be put at risk. Lead exposure causes brain damage and illness, especially impacting children with development problems. It needs to be dealt with it in a way that is long-term, and doesn’t take away from other important programs. This deposit program would provide a long-term source of funding for lead abatement,” said Jeff Tittel. “With this bill we’ll be able to remove lead from schools and drinking water and help protect our most precious and treasured natural resource: our children.”

This is very troubling because lead is one of the most hazardous substances known to man and it impacts children, especially small children. It is especially prevalent in our urban areas with lead paint in homes and antiquated infrastructure. Lead exposure can lead to mental and development disabilities, especially in children under six years old. This bill would create funds from a new source, a bottle and can deposit, that would go towards preventing children and communities from ingesting lead.

“Funding lead abatement is an important way to keep our families and communities safer. The money from this bottle deposit would go towards assisting homeowners and property owners in reducing lead-based paint hazards in housing units. This bill is not a tax; it is a deposit that you get back. The money from the bottles that aren’t collected will then go into this lead fund,” said Jeff Tittel. “We can protect children from lead and help the environment without raising taxes with this bill.”

This bill would also help to reduce litter and the pollution that comes with creating plastics and aluminum cans. Going to the beach on any given day you will encounter a plastic of some kind whether it is straws, water bottles, or bottle caps. In just a few hours one day, Sierra Club volunteers picked up around 500 bottle caps at the beach in Asbury Park. Many of this garbage may never get picked up and remain in our streets, storm drains, and waterways. These plastics are not only an eye sore, but can cause devastating impacts to marine life and even our health.

“Bottles and cans pollute our waterways and environment, clog storm drains, and increase flooding. Each year, counties in New Jersey pick up 6 million pounds a year of cans and bottles that are littering our road sides. It costs towns money to clean out storm basins and fix these flooding issues that arise with all this litter. A deposit program will help prevent trash in our environment and waterways. People will start depositing items instead of throwing them out to end up in landfills or rivers,” said Jeff Tittel. “This bill will also keep these materials out of the trash and out of incinerators. Incinerators such as the one in Newark release air pollution that has toxic substances, including lead, into the air. This bill will help reduce lead in New Jersey in multiple ways.”

This bill is also important because it will promote recycling. The less we recycle the more greenhouse gases and pollution we have from emissions from landfills and emissions from manufacturing new products each time. New Jersey only recycles half of bottles and aluminum cans while Michigan, with a Bottle Bill, recycles 97%. This act would establish the refundable despite system in New Jersey and help us to achieve similar recycling rates as Michigan. Every year we pick up 6 million pounds of cans and bottles and other floatables along our roadway with these bottles getting out into our environment and clog our storm basins and get into our waterways. They have found that around 12.5 million tons of plastic a year goes unaccounted for neither dumped nor recycled ending up on the side of our roads eventually in our waterways.

“One of the important outcomes of the Smart Container Act is that it helps prevent our landfills from being clogged up by millions of tons of glass, plastic, and aluminum. Getting these objects out of the waste stream will help reduce pollution from these landfills. New Jersey has been lagging when it comes to recycling; only half of our cans and bottles get recycled. This bill will encourage and promote recycling and keep these cans and bottles out of landfills,” said Tittel. “Increasing recycling will help to reduce litter and trash as well as reduce greenhouse gasses and pollution.”

Recycling not only protects the environment but, it also helps to lower property taxes or your garbage bill. It costs between $65-$125 a ton to place garbage in the landfill, but you make actually receive between $20 to $30 a ton for certain recycling materials. For other recyclable material it is much cheaper to get rid of, $10 a ton versus $100 a ton. Increasing recycling rates could save households as much as $100 a year as each household produces about 1500 pounds per person of garbage a year. We export 1.8 million tons of waste to other states each year, along with the air pollution from 100,000 trucks. We are the number 2 waste exporter in the country. That is tax money sent out of state each year. By increasing the recycling rate our municipalities will be earning money, not spending it to dump waste. This will help stabilize or lower property taxes, while saving the environment.

“Creating a container deposit will help reduce waste and pollution. This bill will remove litter on our roadways, reduce the clogging of storm drains that causes pollution and flooding, and increase recycling. Most importantly, it will help to remove lead from our homes, schools and drinking water.  It will help protect our children while benefiting our environment and waterways. By going green, we save green, and make green,” said Jeff Tittel. “This bill will help us protect our children while also protecting the environment.”

Testing Drinking Water A3539 (Muoio) is a new bill to address the problem of lead in our drinking water. The legislation would require all schools to test for lead and other toxic substances in drinking water twice a year. It also calls for water remediation if contaminates are found. It will cost about $3 million for the testing alone and the rest going to programs that remove lead from homes, schools and drinking water. In order to fund itself, the bill calls for $20 million total to be diverted from the Clean Energy Fund.

“This bill is an important step in the right direction when it comes to protecting children from lead in our drinking water. First we need to test the water in all our schools to find out where the problems are so we can take immediate steps to protect our children. This bill will do that by requiring mandatory bi-annual drinking water tests in all our schools. You have to identify the problem before you come up with a way to fix it,” said Jeff Tittel. “This is a good first step but we need to be looking at other sources of funds such as environmental settlements, the Hazardous Discharge Fund or Spill Act instead of the Clean Energy Fund. Most importantly, we need to establish a long-term solution for lead abatement and testing funding.”

We also need to make more changes and be stricter when it comes to monitoring our drinking water. New Jersey has a Private Well Testing Act that says water for homes on wells has to be tested at the faucet and the well when a home is sold. We need to expand that Act to include the same standards for all homes and apartments, including ones that are not on wells. We should also make faucet testing a part of the check-list for selling any home. The Act also needs to have a stricter standard by decreasing the Action Level from 15ppb to 5ppb as recommended by the CDC. Too many children are already suffering from lead poisoning.

“Children in some New Jersey cities have more lead in their blood than those in Flint, Michigan. Lead can cause illness and even in small amounts can lead to brain damage and learning disabilities. It can also lead to childhood development problems and other serious health issues. Thousands of children are diagnosed with lead poisoning in New Jersey each year; over 3,000 in 2015 alone,” said Jeff Tittel. “New Jersey is using the Action Level of 15ppb when it should be stricter: at least 5 ppb like in California. If it’s good enough for people to drink from a private well, it should be good enough for our schools.”

Drinking Water Infrastructure A3583 (Spencer) appropriates $20 million from societal benefits charge to DEP for drinking water infrastructure improvements and lead abatement in City of Newark. However, this is only a short-term fix for a much bigger problem and a drop in the bucket when it comes to cost. The costs associated with upgrading New Jersey’s water systems are huge. We need a minimum of $8 billion to upgrade our pipes and another $8 billion for wastewater treatment plants.

“We understand the need to address this issue and think it’s important to improve drinking water infrastructure. However, we believe that we need to focus on long-term funding solutions for lead because it’s a long-term issue. Upgrading our infrastructure will costs billions of dollars. We are also wary of this bill because we cannot continue to keep raiding The Clean Energy Fund. This is money that has been designated to go towards helping people buy energy efficient products and weatherize their homes and promote renewable energy such as wind and solar. We need to have enough money to make sure that the environment and public health are both being protected,” said Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “The $20 million for this bill could be coming from any of the environmental settlement funds. The Governor is already stealing $18 million from Hazardous Discharge Fund and $16 million from the Spill Act. We should be using money from environmental settlements rather than continuously stealing from the Clean Energy Fund.”