Camden has sued the long-beleaguered scrap metal recycler EMR after it says it failed to donate more than a million dollars promised to the community in an agreement last summer.
U.K.-based EMR Advanced Recycling signed an August 2025 memorandum of understanding with the city, in response to a massive fire earlier that year, agreeing to gift more than $3 million to local initiatives through 2030. This would come in the form of an initial $1 million donation into a community benefits fund, followed by annual payments of $450,000 for five years.
The city claims that EMR still has not paid its initial contribution or the first of its annual payments to the newly created EMR Community Benefits Fund, as of the lawsuit’s filing on Sept. 25. But the company says it has allocated just under $2.3 million to a separate EMR Camden Community Investment Fund since 2023, and believes that money should count.
Administered by the Community Foundation of South Jersey, the new fund is intended for community improvement initiatives in Camden, especially for residents in the Waterfront South neighborhood who have been most impacted by EMR.
EMR, in a statement, pointed to the Community Foundation fund’s current $2.3 million balance as proof that they have been making payments for years. The filing states that the company has made 35 payments total, 22 of which came in before the 2025 agreement.
But because the majority of the payments were made prior to 2025, William Tambussi, a lawyer for the city of Camden, argues that the $2.3 million is entirely unrelated to the money that is owed through the agreement.
“There’s two different funds,” Tambussi said. “For them to suggest that the money that they have been depositing since 2023 was agreed on as the deposit for the MOU — that’s just disingenuous.”
Joe Balzano, the CEO of EMR Metal Recycling USA, says the company has met its obligations up to this point and is now just waiting on the city to move forward with distributing the money. The company said in a statement that is “eagerly awaiting votes from the City-appointed MOU Committee members” to award funds to various organizations in the Waterfront South neighborhood.
“I find some of this stuff abhorrent when you see some of the issues that are plaguing some of the residents of Waterfront South, and we’re ready, willing, able, and trying to distribute some much-needed help, and we’re struggling to get that accomplished,” Balzano said in an interview Monday.
“The Community Fund of South Jersey was the designated fund in the MOU, which we put $2.3 million in,” he said. “I think Mr. Tambussi is taking a very difficult read when we pre-funded the account.”
“Mr. Tambussi was not in the negotiations that we had with the city, [he] was not present for those,” Balzano said, implying that the city was aware this is how the funds would be used. “And we did everything that we were intending to do and have done more.”
Tambussi argues that it would have been impossible for EMR to prepay into the MOU fund because it didn’t yet exist. The agreement only came about after the February 2025 fire, he said, which the company would have no way of predicting.
“For them to say that this is pre-funded is really astounding because they would have to assume that they were going to have an obligation in the future — an obligation that stemmed from this critical fire,” Tambussi said.
EMR has not officially responded to the filing in court, but the city is requesting a jury trial in the case.
The sprawling recycling operation has five facilities in the neighborhood and has experienced more than a dozen fires in the last six years, including a lithium-ion battery-caused fire that prompted the evacuation of 100 families last year.
In addition to creating the EMR Camden Community Benefits Fund, the agreement also requires that the company install a state-of-the-art fire suppression system, consolidate its facilities into a smaller footprint, and create an emergency notification system for residents in case of a fire or other emergency at the facility.
