PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are synthetic chemicals used since the 1940s in nonstick cookware, stain- and water-resistant fabrics, food packaging, cosmetics and firefighting foam. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they barely break down. Released from factories, sewage plants, landfills, sludge-fertilized fields and firefighting sites, they build up in our rivers, sediments, fish and bodies. Long-term exposure to some PFAS is linked to certain cancers, immune suppression and reproductive and developmental harm.

Environment New Jersey and NJPIRG’s new report, Forever Chemicals in America’s Rivers and Lakes, found PFAS at 83% of more than 1,600 surface-water sites tested nationwide from 2022 to 2024, and at 91% of the 86 sites tested in New Jersey, including every Raritan watershed location in the data. Yet none of those sites is in the Lower Raritan, and New Jersey still has no surface water quality standards for PFAS. That matters because these rivers supply our drinking water and are where our neighbors fish, paddle and play.

That’s why LRWP joined Environment New Jersey and NJPIRG on the banks of the Raritan on October 14, 2026 to bring attention to the release of the Forever Chemicals Report. LRWP Executive Director Heather Fenyk’s remarks follow:

The LRWP is pleased to support this work to bring attention to the widespread nature of PFAS and the need for state action to reduce PFAS in both surface and groundwater.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the banks of the Raritan River! I’m Heather Fenyk, Executive Director of the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership.

We’re standing in the Lower Raritan Watershed. This is the downstream, most urban and most tidal part of the Raritan Basin, where the river meets the tide and flows on to Perth Amboy and Raritan Bay.

This is a special river, and a hard-working one. Generations of industry along this tidal reach left a legacy we still live with. Mercury, PCBs, arsenic, chromium, lead and copper remain in our sediments and our fish. That’s why people who fish here still have to think twice about what they bring home, and why recovery takes decades.

And the next legacy pollutant is already in the water. PFAS, the forever chemicals, don’t break down. New Jersey was a national leader on PFAS in drinking water. But we still have no surface water quality standards for PFAS in the rivers that feed our taps and that people fish and paddle in. More broadly, our surface water standards for toxic pollutants need to catch up with the science.

So I want to thank Environment New Jersey and the NJPIRG students for this report, Forever Chemicals in America’s Rivers and Lakes. They found PFAS at 83 percent of the more than 1,600 waterways tested nationwide from 2022 to 2024, with 114 different PFAS compounds detected. They’ve made an invisible problem visible.

Here’s what struck me most. Of those 1,600 sites, not one is in the Lower Raritan watershed. Not the river behind me, not the South River, not Lawrence Brook. No data is not clean water. It’s a blind spot.

At LRWP, we believe you can’t fix what you don’t measure. Since 2019, our volunteers and partners have tested this river for bacteria every week at six sites along the tidal Raritan. We work under an EPA-approved quality assurance plan, and we post the results publicly.

That data anchors our new strategy to speed up cleanup plans, called TMDLs, for the Lower Raritan. Those plans set pollution budgets, and today the tidal Raritan from New Brunswick to Perth Amboy has almost none. We want to expand what we measure, including toxic contaminants like PFAS, and we’re launching a technical advisory committee to help do it.

But volunteers can’t set standards. That’s the State’s job.

So today I’m calling on Governor Sherrill’s office to move forward NJDEP’s proposed amendments to the Surface Water Quality Standards, setting criteria for PFAS and 94 other toxic contaminants. Standards are what make a pollutant count. They’re how a waterway gets listed as impaired, how permits set limits, and how cleanup plans get written. Standards are where cleanup begins.

And to members of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee: please advance S4468 and fund the monitoring, in our rivers and our private wells, that tells us where these chemicals are.

The Raritan has come back before, and it can again. Let’s not hand the next generation a new legacy pollutant. Thank you!