The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Numbers Don’t Cover

Plymouth, Indiana is a small city. About 10,000 people live there. The Pregis facility sits at 1411 Pidco Drive, and the industrial district it occupies is the kind of place where you can smell work before you see it. The air near a packaging plant that injects volatile organic compounds into extruded plastic does not smell like clean air. On days when the oxidizers keeping that pollution in check were running below legal temperature thresholds, it smelled worse than it was supposed to.

Volatile organic compounds are not a technical abstraction. They are real chemicals, airborne, inhaled. The category includes compounds linked to respiratory irritation, headaches, damage to the liver and kidneys, and, with chronic exposure, cancer. The legal temperature minimums Pregis violated exist because below those temperatures, the oxidizers simply do not destroy enough of the VOCs they are designed to capture. The unburned remainder goes up the stack and into the air. Into the neighborhoods. Into the lungs.

Nobody in Plymouth received a letter telling them that their air was being managed at substandard levels. Nobody received a phone call. The monitoring records Pregis was required to keep existed inside the company’s own systems, and the EPA did not issue its Finding of Violation until September 2023, which was more than eighteen months after the last documented violation. During those eighteen months, Pregis knew. The community did not.

The consent agreement settled this matter without any adjudication of facts. That legal phrase means: no one ever had to prove in front of a judge or a jury what actually happened to the air in Plymouth during those two-plus years. Pregis signed a document saying it neither admits nor denies the violations. It paid a fine worth less than the cost of one mid-level corporate attorney’s annual salary. It moved on. The people who live near 1411 Pidco Drive did not get to move on from the air they already breathed.

The other detail that sits quietly in the document is this: the EPA only spot-checked 273 days out of the full violation period. Those 273 days were not even consecutive; they were sampled months. In that sample alone, the EPA found 17 days of confirmed violations across the two oxidizers. The full two-year period was never fully reviewed. The total number of violation days across the complete record was never published. The community was never told what the complete accounting looks like, because that accounting was never done.

Legal Receipts: What the Document Actually Says

How the Oversight System Was Supposed to Work — and What Actually Happened

The Clean Air Act’s Title V permit system is built on a simple theory: companies self-monitor, report violations, and face swift enforcement. Here is how that process was supposed to unfold at Pregis, and what actually happened instead.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

Volatile organic compounds are a federally regulated air pollutant category because their health effects on human beings are documented and serious. The Pregis facility’s control failures exposed the surrounding community to concentrations of VOCs above what the permit system was designed to allow.

• VOCs from industrial sources like plastic extrusion include compounds that cause acute respiratory irritation, eye and throat inflammation, and headaches at elevated short-term concentrations. The 2018 Pregis performance tests confirmed the RTOs were designed to achieve above 98% VOC destruction efficiency; every degree below the setpoint reduces that efficiency and increases what reaches the air outside the facility.
• Plymouth, Indiana is a small city of approximately 10,000 residents, and the Pregis facility is an industrial-scale operation. Community members living near the Pidco Drive facility had no way to know during the violation period that the air pollution controls were operating below their required minimum parameters, because Pregis did not publicly disclose this and the EPA did not issue its Finding of Violation until 18 months after the violations had ended.
• The consent agreement contains no health impact assessment, no requirement for Pregis to notify community members about the violation period, and no medical monitoring for potentially exposed residents. The public health response to two-plus years of substandard pollution control is, in this document, absent.
• The EPA’s own maximum penalty structure, up to $59,114 per day of violation, reflects congressional intent that air pollution violations are serious public health matters. Settling at $92,705 total means the financial deterrent against future violations has been substantially reduced for this facility and any other company watching how this case was handled.

Economic Inequality

The enforcement outcome in this case reflects a pattern that consistently benefits large industrial operators at the expense of the communities that live near their facilities and cannot afford to leave.

• Pregis Innovative Packaging LLC is a private-equity-backed company operating multiple industrial facilities across the country. A $92,705 penalty represents a fraction of one day’s operating revenue for a major packaging manufacturer. For the company, this is a cost of doing business. For the community, the cost was two years of breathing air from malfunctioning pollution controls.
• The consent agreement explicitly allows Pregis to neither admit nor deny liability. This legal posture protects the company from findings that could be used in civil litigation by community members or workers seeking compensation for health harms. The people most likely to suffer economic harm from VOC exposure, workers and nearby residents, have no standing in this administrative proceeding and received no direct benefit from the settlement.
• The EPA reduced Pregis’s penalty specifically citing the company’s “cooperation.” Cooperation in this context means communicating with regulators after being caught. Companies with legal resources and compliance departments are structurally positioned to “cooperate” in ways that reduce their penalties. A small business owner or individual facing the same statute would not have the same institutional access to penalty mitigation.
• The monitoring system Pregis used during the violation period, daily screen captures of rolling temperature averages, was replaced in December 2022 with a proper datalogger system. The upgrade came after the EPA had already initiated its investigation. Pregis operated with a less reliable monitoring system for years while the community had no independent verification of compliance.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: Who to Pressure and Where to Show Up

Pregis will pay its fine, update its monitoring equipment, and continue operating in Plymouth, Indiana. The people who live there don’t have that option. Here is who is accountable and what you can do.

Key Decision-Makers in This Case

• Carolyn Persoon, Acting Division Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 5: signed the consent agreement on behalf of the EPA and accepted the reduced penalty.
• Ann L. Coyle, Regional Judicial Officer, EPA Region 5: issued the Final Order ratifying the settlement without any public hearing or adjudication of facts.
• T. McCoy (tmccoy@pregis.com per the consent agreement): identified as the Pregis representative for service of documents in this proceeding.
• [REDACTED – Not in Source]: Pregis’s corporate ownership structure and private equity backers are not named in the consent agreement.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies With Ongoing Authority

• EPA Region 5 (Chicago): Has jurisdiction over Indiana Clean Air Act enforcement. This consent agreement is now part of Pregis’s compliance history and must be considered in any future enforcement action. Contact: R5airenforcement@epa.gov.
• Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM): The agency that issued and renews Pregis’s Title V Operating Permit. IDEM has the authority to impose additional conditions or tighten permit requirements at renewal. Their permit file for Pregis facility ID 099-46334-00028 is public record.
• EPA Office of Inspector General: Has the authority to review whether EPA enforcement decisions, including penalty calculations and settlement terms, adequately served the public interest. Complaints can be submitted at oig.epa.gov.
• DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division: Can pursue civil judicial enforcement if Pregis violates this consent agreement or if future violations meet the threshold for escalated action.

Grassroots and Mutual Aid Actions

• Request Pregis’s full compliance history from IDEM using Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA). The permit file, inspection reports, and violation history are all public documents. Local environmental attorneys and law school clinics can assist with APRA requests at no cost.
• Connect with regional air quality organizing networks in the Midwest, including the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center and Hoosier Environmental Council, which track industrial permit violations in Indiana and support community members in engaging state and federal regulators.
• Attend IDEM public comment periods when Pregis’s Title V permit comes up for renewal. Permit renewals are one of the few formal points where community members can place concerns about a facility’s compliance history on the official record and influence permit conditions.
• Organize neighbors to request an EPA community monitoring program near the Plymouth facility. The EPA’s Air Pollution Monitoring for Communities program can place independent air quality sensors in residential areas near industrial sources, giving residents data independent of what the company self-reports.
• If you or someone you know in Plymouth, Indiana experienced unexplained respiratory symptoms between January 2020 and March 2022, document those experiences in writing and contact a personal injury attorney familiar with environmental torts. The “neither admits nor denies” language in the consent agreement is a barrier but not an absolute one in civil proceedings.