The lower Passaic River is among the nation’s most toxic waterways. Decades of chemical manufacturing and industrial pollution left the muck on the riverbed filled with substances harmful to human health. The sources of that pollution are largely gone today, but the toxic sediment has been waiting for remediation for more than 40 years.

Now that remediation work is the closest it's ever been to beginning.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency last week announced a $125 million settlement with Environmental Resource Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. If the settlement is approved by a federal judge, that money will pay for the construction of the facilities that will process dredged-up polluted material from the river for disposal. And the facilities are critical: Work in the river cannot begin until those facilities are built.

“This is a huge step in cleaning up one of New Jersey’s most complex Superfund sites,” Michael Martucci, the regional administrator for EPA Region 2, said in a statement. “The work laid out in this proposed settlement gets shovels in the ground and lays the foundation for dredging and that brings us one important step closer to a cleaner and restored Passaic River.”

Eric Moses, a spokesperson for the company, said the firm welcomes EPA’s authorization to begin the next step of the cleanup.

“Last week's action marks an important milestone as the Passaic cleanup moves from the planning and design phase to the implementation phase,” he said in a statement. “We look forward to working with EPA to continue to move this project forward.”

Waiting 42 years, and counting

Decades of heavy industry in the area tainted the 17-mile stretch of the Passaic River that winds from the Dundee Dam in Garfield through the industrial sections of Newark and neighboring towns to its mouth at Newark Bay. The EPA has identified more than 100 entities — some defunct, some still around — as potentially responsible for contributing pollution.

The most severe pollution came from a chemical factory that operated on the banks of the river in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, making pesticides like Agent Orange for decades.

The Agent Orange was produced at the site by the Diamond Alkali company, which was later absorbed by Occidental Chemical, also known as OxyChem. Occidental Petroleum recently sold off OxyChem and created Environmental Resource Holdings as a subsidiary to hold legacy environmental liabilities like this.

The pesticide manufacturing and other polluting activities filled the river’s sediment with toxic chemicals including dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, according to the EPA.

This section of the Passaic River is tidal, so the pollution sloshed back and forth, spreading across the 17 miles and into Newark Bay. State authorities still warn people not to eat crabs out of the river. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat and former Newark mayor, has called the river “America’s biggest crime scene.”

The Passaic River was placed on the federal Superfund list in 1984. Today the chemical factory is long gone, demolished in the '80s and entombed underground at the site and covered with a thick layer of clean cap material. A hot spot of toxic sediment was removed from the riverbanks near Lyndhurst in 2013. But the pollution that entered the water largely remains in the muck at the bottom of the river.

The cleanup plan

The EPA has split the river remediation into four sections. The biggest one is Operable Unit 2, a roughly 8-mile section of the river between Newark Bay and the Newark-Belleville border. The EPA in 2016 unveiled a $1.38 billion cleanup plan for that section that calls for bank-to-bank dredging of that section. The riverbed will then be lined with a cap of clean material, such as sand and concrete, to prevent any remaining pollution from spreading. The price of cleaning up all four sections is estimated to be more than $1.8 billion.

The toxic sediment that is scooped out of the river will be a hazardous material, and it will be processed at new, temporary upland facilities in Newark and Harrison before being shipped off for disposal elsewhere, according to the EPA’s plan.

The main facility to be built is a water treatment plant and sediment processing facility to be located in Newark adjacent to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission’s sewage treatment plant on Doremus Avenue. This is where the bulk of pollutants taken out of the river will be readied for disposal under the EPA plan.

A second facility, planned to be built on a former PSE&G gas plant site in Harrison, would be used to process a specific type of oily substance called Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid that the main facility will not be able to handle. Some residents in Harrison have raised concerns about this part of the plan since EPA announced it in 2024. Nikita Joshi, an EPA spokesperson, said this facility is only expected to operate for three months.

A township-owned property farther upstream in Harrison will be used as an equipment staging area, and will have a dock that work crews will use to access the river, said Joshi.

The $125 million settlement announced last week would pay for the facilities, as well as more environmental sampling that will establish the baseline pollution levels. The settlement proposal is now subject to a public comment period and then must be approved by a federal judge.

Building the upland facilities and conducting the sampling is expected to take three years, Joshi said. If the judge approves the settlement, construction could start next year. That would put EPA in a position to potentially begin the dredging work in 2030. After that, according to Joshi, the dredging and capping work should take between eight to 10 years.

Ana Baptista, a co-chair of the Passaic River Community Advisory Group, is an Ironbound native and a longtime advocate for the cleanup. She called it “an intergenerational fight” and welcomed the new settlement.

“We were getting very concerned that the whole thing was going to just stall out,” Baptista said. “It's definitely a bit of forward progress in what has been basically languishing.”

The legal blame game

Large-scale dredging and remediation of the Passaic River is now closer to reality than it has ever been. But uncertainty remains over the most critical detail: Who's going to pay for it?

The new settlement does not cover any of the dredging work. Joshi said who pays for that will be determined by a “future enforcement mechanism or mechanisms,” like the consent decree dictating the new settlement.

Occidental and other parties identified as polluters on the river have battled in the courts for years over how to divide the cleanup costs.

An allocation report commissioned by the EPA determined in 2020 that Occidental is liable for between 92.9% and 99.9% of the full cost for cleaning the river. That report became the basis for a settlement finalized in 2024 that has 82 other polluting parties paying a combined $150 million.

Occidental, on the hook for the remaining costs, is currently challenging the EPA’s use of that allocation report in federal appeals court. Occidental has also previously sought the power to sue the other parties separately to recoup cleanup costs. Moses, the spokesperson for Environmental Resource Holdings, said the firm “will continue to do our part to ensure all responsible parties pay their fair share of the cleanup.”

Other potentially responsible parties and local activists worry the corporate shuffling is another strategy to reduce Occidental’s financial obligations on the river. A new challenge filed in federal court earlier this year seeks an order to declare that Occidental still holds liability for the Passaic River pollution. Occidental has filed a motion to dismiss that case; the judge still has not ruled on that request.

Baptista said river advocates are constantly concerned that polluters will escape paying their fair share of the remediation costs. She said the new settlement shouldn’t be the final obligation for Occidental and its subsidiary.

“ This is not the full liability,” Baptista said. “This is just one small piece of the bigger picture that needs to be paid for by the responsible parties and particularly Occidental.”