September 28, 2026
Your Company’s Overall EHS Numbers May Look Fine. But Regulators Are Looking at Your Lowest Performing Facility
Most companies tell their EHS story at the enterprise level. Injury and illness rates are down across the portfolio. Emissions intensity is reduced. Violations are lower company wide. Those are real accomplishments, and they’re worth highlighting. But that’s not how regulators look at a company.
EPA doesn’t issue a permit to a company. It issues it to a facility. OSHA doesn’t inspect a corporation. It inspects an establishment. Enforcement starts at a specific address, with a specific permit number and a specific compliance history. In my time at EPA, that is where every case began: with a facility’s record, not a company’s annual report.
How Regulators Actually Identify Enforcement Targets
Every core federal program is built around individual facilities. Under the Clean Air Act, High-Priority Violator (HPV) status, EPA’s most serious noncompliance classification, attaches to a facility. NPDES permits are issued outfall by outfall. RCRA tracks generators by ID number. OSHA’s site-specific targeting program selects workplaces for inspection based on the injury and illness data each one reports.
The predictive targeting models we covered in Issue 1 score facilities, not companies. And as federal priorities shift, states and NGOs are working from the same public facility data.
What One Facility Report Shows
To see how this plays out, consider one real facility. The anonymized data below comes from an Ecolumix IN-Site facility risk report and covers 2019 through 2025. It’s a detailed record built entirely from public data, that’s technically available but often hard to find
On the surface, the data doesn’t indicate a high-risk facility. Total penalties over five years come to $16,550 at a site with significant regulatory obligations. Violations across air, water, and waste dropped from 19 in 2021 to 4 in 2025.
But when we investigate the details, it is a different picture.
The facility’s air permit has been in HPV status essentially every day for seven straight years, 2019 through 2025.
Water exceedances peaked at more than 700 percent over permit limits in 2022, led by aluminum, oil and grease, and suspended solids. In 2024, the most recent year with discharge data, they were still above 300 percent.
Lead-bearing hazardous waste (D008) went from about 34 kg in 2019 to nearly 16,000 kg in 2025. Reported TRI releases of lead are up 94 percent over roughly the same period.
The site logged 22 recordable safety incidents in 2025. Its total recordable incident rate (TRIR) and its rate of cases involving days away from work, restricted duty, or job transfer (DART) were both above 3.0 per 100 workers, in a high-hazard industry. OSHA also cited the facility for two serious violations in 2025.
None of this shows up in the penalty column. A compliance team’s penalty screen might pass this site. An inspector would not. And penalties are a lagging, unreliable proxy. As this facility’s data shows, a site can carry serious regulatory exposure for years before a dollar figure ever appears.
Now imagine this facility is one of 40 sites in a portfolio, and the other 39 are solid. Company-wide violations are trending down. The sustainability report reads well. But one facility has been classified as a High-Priority Violator for seven years. That’s the facility a regulator sees first.
Why Outliers Get Missed
When an outlier like this goes unnoticed, it usually isn’t because the EHS team was careless. It’s because of how EHS data is collected and reported.
Enterprise metrics are averages, and averages hide the extremes. One facility with serious problems disappears into 39 good ones. The data is also scattered. Air, water, waste, toxics, and safety records sit in separate federal and state systems, each with its own identifiers. This facility alone carries four water permits and two hazardous waste generator IDs. Few companies stitch all of that together for each of their sites.
The Practical Question
The question isn’t just whether your enterprise numbers are improving. It’s whether you know which of your facilities a regulator, an NGO, or a plaintiff’s attorney would pick first if they pulled your public records today. Would you pick the same one?
That’s why we created Ecolumix IN-Site. Each report pulls a facility’s air, water, hazardous waste, toxics, climate, and worker safety records into one view, with risk and performance scores and multi-year trends. The reports cover more than 1 million industrial and commercial sites across the U.S. You can use them on your own facilities, an acquisition target, or a critical supplier. You can download a sample report here. And if you’d ever like to see what one of your sites looks like from the outside, reach out.
Until Next Week,
Doug Parker
CEO, Ecolumix
Coming in Future Issues:
The Off Ramps: What factors make regulators less likely to pursue enforcement
The On Ramps: What can turn a civil violation into a criminal case
Questions or topics worth covering? Reach out: doug@ecolumix.com
