INFORMATION SESSION &UPDATE ON SOLVAY POLYMERS CONTAMINATION SETTLEMENT- West Deptford (Gloucester County, NJ)
TRENTON — Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner and staff will host a public information session and open house on Thursday, November 7th at 6:30PM, to provide an overview of the state’s settlement and public-health protection work stemming from pollution caused by the Solvay Specialty Polymers facility in West Deptford. The session will be held at the RiverWinds Community Center, 1000 RiverWinds Drive, West Deptford.
The DEP will provide an update on work that will ensure that public water providers and private wells that were impacted by Solvay’s operations are equipped with appropriate treatment. In addition, the NJ Department of Health will be available to answer health-related questions from the public.
Solvay discharged per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other pollutants that impacted public and private drinking water wells in portions of Gloucester and Camden counties. Public wells that were impacted are in Bellmawr, Brooklawn, East Greenwich, Gloucester City, Gibbstown, Mount Royal, Paulsboro, Westville, and Woodbury. Affected private wells are in West Deptford, Logan, Deptford, Greenwich, and Swedesboro.
For more than 30 years, as part of the manufacture of industrial plastics, coatings, and other chemicals at its West Deptford plant, Solvay used Surflon, a proprietary process aid, which contained two types of PFAS, perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). These “forever chemicals” are highly mobile, bioaccumulate, and persist indefinitely in the environment unless remediated.
The West Deptford facility also discharged other PFAS, including monofunctional surfactants (MFS) and bifunctional surfactants (BFS), both also known as replacement compounds, in addition to other contaminants, including semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), metals, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
The DEP issued a Statewide Directive in 2019, ordering Solvay and other companies responsible for PFAS contamination in New Jersey to clean up their pollution. In 2020, the DEP took Solvay to court to compel more swift and immediate action to clean up the contamination.
These actions resulted in a nearly $394 million settlement, made effective through a Judicial Consent Order (JCO) entered on March 6, 2024, that requires Solvay to remediate its pollution and take steps to restore the environment and impacted resources. It is the first of its kind to address PFAS contamination in New Jersey and is a result of the DEP’s broader efforts to hold industrial users and manufacturers of PFAS responsible for the contamination they have caused.
In the time since the lawsuit was filed, Solvay has taken steps to reduce the use and impacts of PFAS at its site—including eliminating the use of PFAS in Solvay’s process aids for manufacturing and implementing additional treatment of the facility’s wastewater effluent streams.