How not to draft pollution cover (US)
A school in New Jersey US found broken glass embedded in a grass field it owned. The school filed a claim with its insurance company citing the following provision of the insurance policy:
“We [the insurance company] will pay your expense to extract ‘pollutants’ from school land.”
The policy defined “pollutants” as “any solid … irritant or contaminant including … waste”.
Coverage was denied by the insurer which alleged that there was no connection between the glass and pollutant in the sense of an environmental hazard, incident or catastrophe.
After a wide-ranging discussion of case law, the court concluded that the case law did not reflect an overwhelming consensus one way or the other whether a solid such as broken glass is covered under a pollutant clean-up clause.
Looking at the plain and ordinary meaning of the provision, the court held that the broken glass, in the words of a dictionary, was “an undesirable element” in the grass sports field and its introduction into the grass contaminated the field and made it unfit for use and was a pollutant in the form of a “solid contaminant” covered by the policy.
A final decision has yet to be made. The case is however a clear illustration of how a word like “pollution” will not necessarily be seen as requiring “traditional environmental pollution” such as an environmental hazard, incident, or catastrophe.
[Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child v Utica National Insurance Group in the United States District Court, District of New Jersey, case number 25-cv-13186 (19 February 2026)]