For decades, New Jersey’s textiles, metals, electronics, and chemicals industries powered America, improving quality of life for millions, but leaving later generations to clean up the unintended environmental harm. The birthplace of America’s industrial revolution, our state also has a long, proud, and bipartisan history of national leadership in restoring and improving environmental quality.

That legacy has left us somewhat prescient. Chances are, if you are reckoning with an emerging contaminant, it has already emerged here, and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is busy wrestling it out of the ground. After all, the federal Superfund law was modeled on the earlier New Jersey Spill Act. We boast the most contaminated sites in the country because we seek them out and clean them up—a mark not of indignity, but of our resolve.

So too is the New Jersey story of PFAS now turning up in water supplies across the country, scarring natural resources around the globe, and finally receiving due attention from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. New Jersey was home to a manufacturing epicenter that discharged loads of the so-called “forever chemicals” into our surface waters, soil, wetlands, groundwater, and air. As a result, we now find PFAS in our drinking water supplies, our wildlife, and our blood serum.

But we are cleaning up.

When PFAS were initially detected, in 2006, NJDEP got to work on the nation’s first statewide occurrence studies of PFAS in public drinking water, leading analytical efforts and research on the health effects of exposure. Later waterway sampling deepened our understanding of bioaccumulation in fish, triggering consumption advisories.

Our eyes opened to the widespread and persistent environmental and public health risks, New Jersey became the first state to enact a regulatory standard for monitoring and removing a PFAS compound from drinking water. NJDEP has now promulgated health-based drinking water Maximum Contaminant Levels for PFNA, PFOA, and PFOS, as well as groundwater standards governing cleanup of these three if found at contaminated sites. And, most recently, our agency established soil remediation standards for these chemicals.

Today, 76 New Jersey drinking water systems have PFAS at levels that exceed health-based standards, placing a new multi-million-dollar treatment burden on each utility and its ratepayers. PFAS also lurks in wastewater discharged from sewage treatment plants that could similarly require expensive infrastructure improvements. PFAS-contaminated groundwater plumes plague New Jersey, impairing private drinking water wells and complicating brownfields remediation and redevelopment.

Other states are too confronting the PFAS fallout, and its magnitude demands concerted federal legislative action to deliver the financial resources necessary to clean up what is a national mess.

New Jersey refuses to wait. With the resources available, our agency is defraying the cost of PFAS treatment for public utilities and aiding homeowners with contaminated private wells. Our people are working collaboratively with wastewater systems to identify risks, and with licensed “site remediation professionals” to remove PFAS found in soil and groundwater. And, to prevent manufacturers from leaving New Jersey taxpayers to clean up after them, NJDEP is pursuing multiple lawsuits to hold responsible parties accountable.

To discount or leave these threats lying in wait for later generations would be convenient—but unconscionable. We lean instead on the gift left by our industrial legacy and the environmental quality champions who followed—like former Governor Jim Florio, who as a congressman was an author of the Superfund law. New Jersey has resolved to advance the science and regulate accordingly, to make public investments in cleanup solutions, and to hold responsible parties accountable for their pollution. We resolve to leave the place better than we found it.