The cities most burdened by combined sewer overflows — and why it’s an environmental justice issue

Published by NJ Clean Stream  |  Combined Sewer Overflows Series, Article 2 of 3

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Newark and the Passaic River: the most burdened system in the state

Newark is home to more CSO outfalls than any other city in New Jersey. The Passaic River, which flows through Newark’s eastern boundary before reaching Newark Bay and New York Harbor, receives CSO discharges from Newark and multiple upstream communities — Paterson, Clifton, Passaic, and others — making it one of the most CSO-burdened waterways in the northeastern United States.

The Passaic River through Newark has been listed as an impaired waterway under the Clean Water Act for decades. Fecal indicator bacteria regularly exceed safe levels for contact recreation. Fish consumption advisories are permanent. For Newark’s residents — a majority of whom are Black and Latino, many living below the poverty line — the Passaic is the neighborhood waterway. Children play near it, residents fish from its banks. But they are advised not to swim in it, not to eat the fish they catch, and to avoid contact with flood water after rain. The river that runs through their neighborhood is, for practical purposes, inaccessible as a recreational resource for much of the year.

Trenton and the Delaware River

Trenton is one of New Jersey’s oldest cities and one of the most burdened by combined sewer infrastructure. The Delaware River, which forms Trenton’s western boundary, receives CSO discharges from Trenton’s combined sewer system — outfalls along the waterfront that discharge during storm events into one of the nation’s most historically important waterways.

The Delaware is dramatically cleaner than it was in the mid-twentieth century, when direct industrial discharges made it a severe pollution hazard. But CSO discharges continue to introduce pathogen contamination that prevents the river from fully recovering and periodically makes it unsafe for contact recreation. And Trenton’s challenge is compounded by severe fiscal stress. In crisis for decades, the city’s multi-hundred-million-dollar CSO remediation need is beyond its financial capacity. State and federal support has been insufficient to bridge the gap.

The residents who remain in Trenton — predominantly Black and Latino, with poverty rates among the highest in New Jersey — bear the environmental consequences of a fiscal and infrastructure crisis not of their making.

Camden and cumulative environmental burden

Camden is regularly cited in national studies as one of the most environmentally burdened communities in the United States. Its environmental challenges include proximity to heavy industry, Superfund sites, hazardous waste facilities, major transportation corridors, and CSO outfalls discharging into the Delaware River and the city’s waterfront.

Camden’s CSO burden exists alongside a constellation of other environmental exposures that compound each other’s effects. Research on environmental justice consistently finds that environmental burdens are not simply additive — they interact with the social determinants of health (poverty, lack of health care access, chronic stress, poor nutrition) to produce health outcomes worse than any single exposure would predict. The cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, gastrointestinal infection, and neurological impairment associated with environmental contamination interact with chronic stress of poverty to shorten lives and reduce quality of life in ways not captured by addressing any single exposure in isolation.

Paterson and the urban Passaic River corridor

Paterson — New Jersey’s third-largest city and one of its most diverse, home to large Latino, Black, and Middle Eastern communities — sits on the Passaic River at the Great Falls, now a National Historical Park. The Great Falls and surrounding waterfront have been the subject of significant redevelopment investment, with an explicit goal of making the waterfront a public amenity for Paterson’s residents.

But the waterfront revitalization investment coexists with a combined sewer system that continues to discharge raw sewage into the Passaic during every significant rainfall. The restored Great Falls is beautiful — but the water flowing over it after a storm may contain pathogen concentrations that make wading in the mist pool inadvisable. Communities cannot fully benefit from investments in waterfront green space and recreational infrastructure as long as those waterways remain contaminated. Environmental remediation and neighborhood investment are not separate agendas. They are necessarily linked.

The funding gap: who pays for infrastructure equity

Infrastructure investment in the United States is primarily financed locally — through municipal bonds, sewer rate revenues, and local capital budgets. This works reasonably well for communities with strong tax bases and growing populations. It works very poorly for older, lower-income cities with declining populations and ratepayer bases that cannot bear significant rate increases.

The Clean Water State Revolving Fund provides low-interest loans to water utilities — loans, not grants. For a community like Camden or Trenton, whose infrastructure needs exceed their borrowing capacity and whose ratepayers cannot support additional debt service, low-interest loans are not sufficient. These communities need grants — direct subsidies — to fund CSO remediation without placing the cost on ratepayers who cannot afford it.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) included significant new funding for water infrastructure and specifically for CSO remediation. New Jersey has received substantial allocations. But the distribution within the state does not always direct money to communities with the greatest need and least capacity to finance solutions independently.

The recreational access gap

The environmental justice dimensions of CSO contamination extend beyond health effects to access to recreational water — a quality-of-life issue with real implications for children’s physical and mental health, community cohesion, and neighborhood desirability.

A family in Morris County can take their children to swim in the Rockaway River. A family in Newark cannot safely take their children to the Passaic River. A family in Princeton can recreate on Carnegie Lake. A family in Trenton faces recreational advisories on the Delaware. Research consistently finds that access to natural environments contributes to physical health, mental health, and childhood development. The recreational access gap is another dimension of the same structural inequity that produces the health burden — and it reinforces it. Communities whose waterways are contaminated are less attractive to investment, less able to retain middle-income residents, and thus less able to build the tax base that would fund infrastructure improvements.