Newark Bay - Pollution and Marine Life

Pollution and Marine Life

Further information: Marine life of New York Harbor See also: New Jersey Meadowlands

Both the tributaries, particularly the Passaic River, have sections which are lined with heavy industry. Some industrial facilities discharged wastes into the tributaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prior to passage to the 1972 Clean Water Act. High levels of PCBs and dioxin have been detected in the bay. It also has high levels of mercury, copper and other toxic chemicals.

While illegal discharges of chemical waste have been stopped, crabbing is illegal and fishing is limited due to chemicals that remain in the sediment.

Read more about this topic:  Newark Bay

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