700 residents and former residents of Upper Ringwood in New Jersey, U.S.A., have filed a lawsuit against carmaker Ford that may turn out to be one of the largest environmental battles ever.

According to the complaint, the residents allege that Ford dumped toxic waste that included PCB's, heavy metals, and volatile organic compounds in a dumping site in the area between the years of 1967 and 1971. They are claiming property damage, personal injury compensation, the expense of medical monitoring and punitive damages.

People in the area cite unusual skin rashes, an abnormally high number of asthma cases and a multitude of cancers. Among the 700 people filing the lawsuit, a hundred come from a Native American tribe, the Ramapough Mountain Indian Tribe, who has lived in the area for more than two hundred years.

Ford will likely not deny having dumped the waste that was mainly paint sludge and other miscellaneous industrial waste. The property was owned by a subsidiary of the company and Ford apparently hired sub-contractors to transport the waste to the site. One of those sub-contractors, ISA, is also included as a defendant in the lawsuit. On four occasions Ford attempted to clean up the site and announced that the residents were in no danger. The complainants allege that Ford acted fraudulently by declaring the site clean when they knew that it was not and by telling people of the area that it posed no health hazard when they knew that it did.

In 1983, the area was picked as a Superfund site. These are areas where hazardous waste is found and the US government steps in to clean up the mess. In 1994, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the site clean. In 2004, residents found that not only was the toxic waste buried on the Ford property, some was uncovered on their own properties.

In the lawsuit they allege that Ford used the mountainous area for "virtually free disposal and storage of toxic waste for decades". They claim that they were the ones who paid the cost for that storage with their health and they want Ford to pay up.

Law experts predict that Ford will not deny that they used the site, but will rather try to blame others for any negligence or fraud. Legal pundits also admit that it is very difficult for people to establish direct correlation between such dumpsites and illness in the surrounding population. Environmental studies are often inconclusive making it difficult for courts to rule in the favour of the plaintiffs.

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