“ In 1969 alone...the Mahwah factory generated 84,000 cubic yards of waste, including 1.3 million gallons of paint sludge. That’s enough waste to fill 25 Olympic swimming pools.”
- Jan Barry, Reporter for The Record
The Ford Plant in Mahwah generated hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of waste and millions of gallons of paint sludge. For each car made, 5 gallons of paint was produced, equating to 6,000 gallons of sludge a day. This waste was primarily disposed of in the Meadows around Hillburn, NY and in the Mine Area of Ringwood. After a subsidiary of Ford, Ringwood Realty, came into ownership of the mines in 1965 they contracted O’Connor Trucking to remove waste from the Mahwah plant. Ford records indicate that during these years O’Connor disposed of this waste at the Ringwood Mines Landfill site. As The Record reported on October 2, 2005:
" A slab of bright blue lies beside a mountain stream above the Wanaque Reservoir. It’s a sporty color, maybe the 'Diamond Blue' that Ford sprayed on Galaxies in the late 1960s. It hardened like lava where it was dumped more than a generation ago. When running high, the stream rinses over the slab and down the mountain, through marshes and past beaver dams, toward the reservoir. It’s everywhere, this paint. Chunks of it jut from the driveway of a house in Ringwood where a child got lead poisoning. It is so toxic he and his mom have moved out. Piles of it, weathered and gray and wrinkled like an elephant’s skin, cling to a hillside. Nearby is the home of a boy who died of a rare tumor. On the other side of the hill a spring-fed stream once ran clear and fresh. For generations, it quenched the thirst of the mountain’s residents, the Ramapoughs. Now the water is bright orange and laced with cancer-causing benzene. "
" The chemical cocktail that makes up Ford Motor Company paint sludge is a 20th century wonder, a new compound that in some ways defies reason, for even the volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) that ought to have long ago dissipated when exposed to the air remain trapped inside the hardened sludge, waiting to release gas as much as fifty years later.”
