“The Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey (CIANJ) and its flagship publication, COMMERCE Magazine, celebrated environmental leadership in the business community at a special awards breakfast this week.

More than 150 consultants, attorneys, accountants, engineers, licensed site remediation professionals and others, who work in the environmental sector, gathered at the Glen Ridge Country Club for the first annual event…

CIANJ and COMMERCE Magazine also honored an array of companies for their environmental leadership in recycling, pollution prevention, green building design, environmental conservation, energy conservation, community impact, manufacturing innovation, and brownfield redevelopment. They were chosen from nominations submitted to the magazine by CIANJ member and the business community at-large. The environmental awards were the cover story of COMMERCE this month. More than 60 pages were dedicated to stories of the companies’ accomplishments.”*

 

PennJersey President, Rodger A. Ferguson, Jr., had this to say:

In today’s hot real estate market, properties with significant environmental challenges that previously wouldn’t be considered are being purchased and redeveloped. Gov. Phil Murphy has been encouraging redevelopment through his economic plan, but there are still challenges, like state Department of Environmental Protection requiring a redeveloper to establish a remediation funding source under an administrative consent order even if the redeveloper has no relation to the responsible party when the remediation timeframes have been missed.  We are actively discussing changes to the Site Remediation Reform act on behalf of LSRPs to improve the process, and issues like this have been brought to the table by developers for discussion.

We worked collaboratively with our client, a local Board of Education, and the New Jersey Schools Development Authority on a $30 million elementary school on a brownfields site that’s scheduled to open this fall in a North Jersey city. We did the pre-construction work on behalf of our client, including a preliminary assessment and the soil and groundwater investigations.  Our services included soil and foundation removal, an interim cap, and groundwater monitoring.  We also evaluated the site for potential vapor intrusion and recommended controls for construction, so the state’s design-build contractor could move ahead and construct a safe building.  When the state’s design-build contractor discovered a large, underground storage tank that was under the sidewalk and just off the site, we collaborated on its removal.  On a site like that there can always be surprises.  It’s like going through layers of civilization.

 

*CIANJ & COMMERCE Magazine Press Release