A Chemical Factory Running on Broken Rules

Stoner, Inc. sits on an 11.7-acre property at 170 Robert Fulton Highway in Quarryville, Pennsylvania. The company manufactures between 700 and 800 kinds of chemical products for industrial and retail clients, including mold-release agents and lubricants, sold in aerosol bottles, trigger bottles, wipes, and bulk totes.

The company is officially classified by the EPA as a Large Quantity Generator (LQG) of hazardous waste. That classification carries serious legal obligations: regular training, locked and labeled containers, documented emergency procedures, and formal permits for storing or treating hazardous material. Stoner, Inc. systematically failed every single one of those obligations.

On May 21, 2024, EPA inspectors walked through that facility and found a portrait of institutional neglect. The violations they documented span six separate legal counts, covering everything from improperly stored flammable waste to a company-wide training blackout that lasted an entire calendar year.

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

The Workers Who Handled Poison Without Knowing It

The EPA found that Stoner, Inc. failed to provide mandatory hazardous waste training to every single one of its employees in the entire calendar year of 2022. That is a full twelve months during which every worker on that production floor, every person who handled those 55-gallon drums and 5-gallon buckets of flammable chemical waste, did so without any federally required training on what to do if something went wrong.

In 2023, 7 out of 39 employees had missing training records. The company’s own training list did not even include the main Environment, Health, and Safety Manager, the person whose entire job is supposed to be protecting workers from chemical exposure. The same list omitted another individual who regularly signed hazardous waste shipping manifests. The people most responsible for chemical safety had been cut out of the safety system entirely.

This is what the settlement paperwork calls an administrative violation. What it actually describes is a company that left its workforce legally unprotected while manufacturing hundreds of chemical products with flammable, solvent-based, and acetone-laden waste streams running through open containers on every floor of the building.

Open Buckets, Open Flames, Open Risk

EPA inspectors counted at least seven separate instances of open hazardous waste containers on the day of the May 21, 2024 inspection. These were not obscure back-corner storage failures. They were on the production floor, next to filling lines, inside the gas house, and in the R&D lab. One unlabeled 5-gallon bucket sat directly beneath an aerosol can puncturing unit on the second floor, open and exposed, collecting the contents of punctured aerosol cans classified as D001 hazardous waste, which is the federal classification for ignitable waste.

D001 waste is flammable. Aerosol cans are pressurized. Acetone, isopropyl alcohol, and solvent-based residues were flowing through production lines in adjacent areas. Stoner, Inc. manufactures products sold in aerosol bottles. The combination of open ignitable waste, pressurized containers, and an aerosol filling operation is precisely the scenario that federal hazardous waste regulations exist to prevent. Stoner, Inc. left all of those elements together, uncovered, and untrained-for, every single day.

The Emergency Plan That Would Have Gotten People Killed

Federal law requires hazardous waste facilities to maintain a detailed Contingency Plan, a written document that tells workers exactly what to do in the event of a fire, an explosion, or an unplanned release of hazardous material. The plan must name specific emergency coordinators with direct phone numbers, describe formal arrangements with local fire departments, hospitals, and emergency response teams, inventory all emergency equipment, and include evacuation maps.

Stoner, Inc.’s plan did not mention hazardous waste or RCRA even once. For fire department contact information, the plan listed “911.” No direct coordination with the Quarryville Fire Company was documented. No evacuation routes or route maps existed anywhere in the plan. The two people listed as emergency contacts were given no designated role as Emergency Coordinator or Alternate Emergency Coordinator. The plan was never formally shared with local authorities. If a fire had broken out in that gas house next to the aerosol filling line, the first responders arriving on scene would have had no idea that flammable hazardous waste was stored on site, because the company never told them.

Legal Receipts: The Documents Speak for Themselves

Societal Impact: Who Actually Pays the Price

■ Environmental Degradation

Stoner, Inc. generated approximately sixteen 55-gallon drums (that is roughly 880 gallons) of flammable “water” waste per month from product overruns, mix tank cleaning, and tank farm drippages. It generated approximately six 55-gallon drums (roughly 330 gallons) of solvent-based “fuel” waste per month. And it disposed of spent acetone and isopropyl alcohol-soaked rags by throwing them directly into regular municipal trash, bypassing the entire hazardous waste disposal system.

That is a regular monthly stream of hazardous chemical material leaving a facility without proper classification, labeling, or tracking. Hazardous waste that enters regular trash streams can end up in municipal landfills not designed to contain chemical contamination. Acetone and isopropyl alcohol are volatile organic compounds. They do not simply disappear in a landfill. They volatilize into the air and leach into groundwater. Quarryville, Pennsylvania is a small Lancaster County town. Its residents rely on local water sources.

The facility was also storing containers of a chemical called Durazane, which the company no longer intended to use as a product ingredient, and was “occasionally venting” those containers, according to EPA documents. No hazardous waste determination had ever been made for those containers. “Occasionally venting” chemical containers that haven’t been properly assessed means releasing unclassified chemical vapors directly into the air inside an occupied facility.

■ Public Health

The workers at Stoner, Inc. are the most direct victims here. They handled D001 ignitable waste in open, unlabeled containers, including a 5-gallon open bucket positioned directly beneath a machine that punctures pressurized aerosol cans. D001 is the EPA classification for flammable hazardous waste. An ignition source near an open bucket of that material does not result in a regulatory citation. It results in a fire or explosion inside a building full of workers who, according to the company’s own records, had received zero hazardous waste safety training for an entire year.

The facility’s R&D Lab also contained three open, unlabeled, undated 5-gallon buckets in a curing process that the Lab Director confirmed takes longer than 90 days and produces material classified as hazardous waste throughout that period. These buckets sat open under a lab hood for months at a time, exposing lab personnel to chemical vapors from an unclassified, unmonitored source on a continuous basis.

The emergency response gap compounds every other risk. If a chemical release, fire, or explosion had occurred at this facility, first responders arriving at the scene would have had no advance knowledge that the building contained hazardous waste, because Stoner, Inc. never shared its emergency plan with local authorities and the plan itself didn’t mention hazardous waste. The community surrounding the facility on Robert Fulton Highway, the neighborhoods and families within response range of a Quarryville chemical incident, had zero protection from this institutional failure.

■ Economic Inequality

Stoner, Inc. settled this case for $68,200 ($68,200, enough to cover a Quarryville working family’s full rent for roughly 16 months). That number is the total penalty for six federal violations, two years of training failures affecting 39 workers, a useless emergency plan, illegal hazardous waste treatment, improper waste disposal, and multiple open-container violations discovered in a single inspection. The EPA assessed this penalty by considering the company’s “good faith efforts to comply,” a consideration that rewards any company willing to sign a settlement agreement rather than fight the charges.

Stoner, Inc. signed this agreement while explicitly “neither admitting nor denying” the specific factual allegations. The company’s president, Robert Ecklin Jr., signed the document. The fine is a cost of doing business. There is no requirement to remediate any environmental harm, no criminal referral, no requirement to compensate workers who handled hazardous materials without training. The people who breathed acetone vapors from open trash bags and worked next to open flammable waste containers get nothing. The company gets a clean record once the check clears.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: Who to Watch and How to Fight

Key Individuals Named in the Document

These individuals were identified in the EPA consent agreement and final order:

• Robert Ecklin Jr., President, Stoner, Inc. — signed the consent agreement binding the company to its terms
• Dean Swartz, Safety Director, Stoner, Inc. — listed as a primary contact served with the final order
• Nicole Okino, EPA Region 3 Enforcement Officer/Inspector — conducted the May 21, 2024 inspection that uncovered the violations

Regulatory Bodies With Jurisdiction

• U.S. EPA Region 3 — primary enforcement authority; holds ongoing jurisdiction over RCRA compliance at Stoner, Inc. and reserves the right to act on any imminent endangerment
• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) — was formally notified of this action on October 24, 2024 and has state-level jurisdiction over hazardous waste management
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) — has independent jurisdiction over worker safety standards; the training failures and open flammable waste containers documented here may constitute separate OSHA violations
• DOJ (Department of Justice) — EPA explicitly reserves the right to refer any future noncompliance to DOJ for litigation and criminal sanctions

Your Next Move

File a public comment or complaint with EPA Region 3 and PA DEP if you live near the Quarryville facility and believe you have been affected. Workers at Stoner, Inc. can contact OSHA directly to report hazardous conditions without fear of retaliation. The EPA’s enforcement record in this case is public, permanent, and searchable. If you are a Quarryville resident or a Lancaster County environmental group, demand that local emergency responders confirm they have received an updated hazardous waste contingency plan from Stoner, Inc., because the law now requires one.

Mutual aid means knowing your neighbors and your neighborhood’s risks. Connect with Clean Air Council, PennEnvironment, or Lancaster-based community organizations tracking industrial chemical facilities. Demand that your local fire company knows what chemicals are stored at every facility in its response zone. These are public safety rights, and every community has the standing to enforce them.