July 20, 2026
EHS Risk Explained.
The Clean Water Act has done more to improve the physical condition of America’s waterways than any other law or policy I can think of. Before it passed in 1972, many of the nation’s lakes and rivers were unsafe for fishing or swimming. Five decades and more than a trillion dollars in wastewater infrastructure investment later, rivers that people once wrote off are places to fish and swim today. That didn’t happen through goodwill. It happened because the law built an enforcement and reporting system to back it up.
What’s Changed
So why am I writing about a more than 50-year-old law? Data transparency and scrutiny.
At a basic level, no company or public entity, think big municipal wastewater plants, can discharge directly into waters of the United States without a permit from EPA or a state regulator. Those permits come with real requirements, and falsifying or misreporting the data behind them can mean civil or criminal penalties. The shorthand for these permits is “NPDES,” the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System.
For decades, permittees monitored their discharges and mailed paper reports, Discharge Monitoring Reports (DMRs), to regulators every month or quarter. That changed beginning in 2016, when EPA required DMR data to be submitted electronically. What used to sit in a state agency’s filing cabinet became searchable.
Before electronic reporting, an outside group that suspected ongoing noncompliance had one real option: file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, wait, then wade through paper. That process could take years. Electronic reporting turned months of analysis into days, and it let the public compare a facility’s performance across a watershed, an industry, or a region. Add in the analytical tools now built on top of that data, and a site’s water compliance record is effectively a public report card.
Public Monitoring in Practice
Hanover Foods, a food processing plant in Pennsylvania, shows how that plays out. The Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association and the Environmental Integrity Project pulled Hanover’s public discharge monitoring reports and state inspection records and found more than 600 permit exceedances between 2016 and 2021. One part of the company’s operations discharged wastewater into a local creek that feeds the Chesapeake Bay. In September 2021, these groups filed a citizen suit. Four years of litigation and negotiation followed. EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection eventually joined the case, and in November 2025 a consent decree was lodged outlining a $1.15 million penalty and a mandated overhaul of Hanover’s wastewater treatment system.
The Data
That case was built entirely on Hanover’s direct-discharge data, the searchable half. Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in a case like that. If you discharge directly and hold your own NPDES permit, your data is fully public and searchable. If you’re an indirect discharger routing wastewater through a Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTW), that data typically sits one level removed, folded into the municipality’s own files, and it’s far harder for an outsider to pull at scale. The wastewater routed to the POTW is held to the same pretreatment standards, and it doesn’t disappear from regulatory scrutiny. It’s just much harder to build a public case around.
Why it Matters
That can be a blind spot for EHS teams and certainly outsiders. Some sites hold an NPDES permit for one outfall and send a separate wastewater stream to the local POTW. Two discharge paths from the same facility, held to the same substantive requirements, with two very different levels of public visibility. It’s tempting to read that gap as a reprieve. It isn’t. The standards don’t change because the discharge routes through a POTW instead of straight to a waterway.
When I ran EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division, we had a steady stream of pretreatment investigations, cases built on facilities that had allegedly falsified data they sent to their POTW. What’s changed is how fast a pattern of noncompliance can surface once someone starts looking at NPDES permit holders, whether that someone is a regulator, an NGO, or a competitor. And while outsiders may have a hard time assessing the performance of a site discharging to a POTW, that POTW has a much clearer picture what it receives and from whom, which means the data still needs to hold up. Treat your pretreatment reporting with the same rigor as your direct NPDES reporting: the same QA on sampling and lab data, the same sign-off before it goes out, the same audit trail behind it.
The Practical Question
The question for an EHS team isn’t just whether your direct discharge patterns look fine. It’s whether you’ve run your own facility, every outfall, every permit, direct and indirect, through the same watershed-level analysis an NGO or a regulator would run before they ever contact you.
As the saying goes, if you’re being chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear. You just need to outrun the slowest person in your group. The same logic applies here, with one twist: most companies only check half of that comparison they can see, the direct-discharge data. You might have compliance gaps in your water program, direct or indirect, and so might the company standing next to you. What matters to regulators is how you compare on both streams, watershed-wide, against your peers, and across your region.
Until next week,
Doug Parker
CEO, Ecolumix
Coming in future issues:
Your suppliers’ risk is already your risk. EHS performance and supplier reliability are more linked than most companies realize. We’ll look at how to build resilience along the way and avoid the disruption and brand impacts when vendor risks can turn into real supplier problems.
The enforcement staircase: administrative, civil, criminal. A plain-language explainer of how environmental violations can escalate — and what separates noncompliance from a federal indictment.
Questions or topics worth covering? Reach out: doug@ecolumix.com
