HYDAC’s Fined $74K After Endangering Workers w/ Hazardous Waste

The Price of Poison is $74,000

In a factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, people worked around open drums of toxic chemicals. Day in and day out, the air carried the fumes of solvents like methyl ethyl ketone, a chemical that can damage the nervous system. Employees, some of whom hadn’t been trained on how to handle these materials for years, went about their jobs, trusting they were safe.

They weren’t.

Their employer, HYDAC Corp., a manufacturer of hydraulic components, was cutting corners. Not small corners, neither. These were the kind of gaping, systemic failures that regulators are supposed to catch—the kind that put the health of workers and the surrounding community on the line every single day. And when they finally got caught, the price they paid was a joke.

This isn’t just a story about one company’s mistakes. It’s a story about a system where putting lives at risk is treated as a minor business expense, and where justice comes in the form of a check that barely makes a dent in the corporate balance sheet.

A Pattern of Deception

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rulebook for handling hazardous waste is like a shield, designed to protect people from the poisons our industrial economy produces. HYDAC Corp. basically shattered those protections. Read on for more details >:3

HYDAC was registered with the state of Pennsylvania as a “small quantity generator” of hazardous waste, a status that comes with fewer, less stringent safety regulations.

But that was a lie. A review of their own shipping manifest records revealed the truth: on at least seven separate occasions between 2021 and 2023, HYDAC generated enough hazardous waste to be classified as a “large quantity generator,” a category that requires far stricter safety protocols and emergency planning.

They were operating under a false identity, dodging the safety measures designed to protect their own people and the first responders who would have to run into that building if something went wrong.

But the deception ran deeper. Inside the facility, the scene described by EPA inspectors was a masterclass in carelessness.

• Open Containers: Drums of hazardous waste were left wide open, with funnels sticking out of them, releasing toxic fumes into the workspace when no one was even using them.
• Missing Labels: Other barrels filled with chemical waste had no “Hazardous Waste” label at all. One was absurdly marked “NON-RCRA REGULATED WASTE,” essentially declaring itself harmless when it was anything but.
• Fake Dates: In a truly bizarre move, the company admitted to pre-printing “Accumulation Start Date” labels in bulk. This means the dates on their barrels of toxic sludge were meaningless fictions, making it impossible to know how long these dangerous materials had been sitting there, potentially degrading their containers.
• Untrained Staff: For two full years—2021 and 2022—there was no record of hazardous waste training for employees. The very people signing the documents to ship this poison off-site were working without the required annual safety training.

This was a total breakdown of the most basic safety procedures, a pattern of neglect that stretched across years.

A Timeline of Neglect

To understand how this happened, you have to see it laid out. This wasn’t a one-time mistake, but a consistent operational choice.

The Illusion of Accountability

And what was the consequence for this mountain of failures? A civil penalty of $74,000.

Let’s be clear about what that number means. For a global corporation like HYDAC, $74,000 is not a punishment. It is a business expense, a minor fee for getting caught. It is the cost of polluting, the price of putting people at risk.

Crucially, the settlement allows HYDAC to sidestep any real accountability. The legal document explicitly states that the company “neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations”. No one has to say, “We were wrong.” No executive has to answer for the decision to forgo training or to misrepresent the company’s waste generation.

This is a story we see over and over.

A company like HYDAC treats safety regulations as optional. It operates this way for years, saving money on training, equipment, and proper disposal. When the government finally catches on, the company’s lawyers negotiate a settlement.

A fine is paid. A press release might be issued (they rarely are). And nothing fundamentally changes. The system that incentivized the bad behavior in the first place remains perfectly intact. The fine is just the cost of admission to a game where profits are private and the risks are pushed onto the public.

What Real Justice Looks Like

This can’t be the end of the story. If we accept a $74,000 fine as justice for years of endangering workers and deceiving regulators, then we’re accepting that our health and safety are for sale—and they’re going cheap.

Real justice would be a penalty that actually stings, one that forces a company’s board of directors to understand that cutting corners on safety is the most expensive decision they can make. Real accountability would mean holding the individual executives who presided over these failures personally responsible.

And real change would mean building a system with teeth. A system with proactive, well-funded regulators who can stop this before it happens, not just clean up the mess afterward. A system that empowers workers to report dangerous conditions without fear of reprisal.

Until then, we’re left with cases like this one: a paper trail of violations, a list of risks imposed on people who just wanted to do their jobs, and a fine that amounts to nothing more than the price of poison.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the Consent Agreement and Final Order in the matter of HYDAC Corp., EPA Docket No. RCRA-03-2025-0098, filed on August 21, 2025.

Please click on this link to read more about this story of employee endangerment: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/0D5F28543F62166885258CED006F43DD/$File/HYDAC%20Corp_RCRA%20CAFO_Aug%2021%202025_Redacted.pdf