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Executive Summary
As the new home of NJPIRG's environmental work, Environment New Jersey can be contacted regarding this report.
Prepared By Douglas O’Malley, NJPIRG’s Clean Water Advocate
Antidegradation and the Clean Water Act
New Jersey’s waters, like all states, are protected by the broad protections of the Clean
Water Act of 1972. The impetus for the act, and its most well-known application, was to
clean up some of the nation’s most polluted waterways. However, it also granted broad
protections to waterways that were not polluted, called anti-degradation protections. The
Act defined the range of protections from Tier I [the Mississippi] to Tier III [national and
state parks]. In New Jersey, these protections are spelled in the Surface Water Quality
Standards [SWQS] with differing classifications to protect everything from shellfish
waters, trout streams, Pinelands waterways and coastal estuaries.
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