Environmental Permitting for a Growing Business

Environmental permitting is the process of getting an agency’s written permission to operate the way you intend to operate. If you’re growing, the permit you already have may not cover what you’re about to do, and that gap is the thing to find before the equipment arrives. Owners get caught here because the question isn’t triggered by revenue or headcount. It’s triggered by a physical fact: what your operation emits, discharges, stores or generates, and how much of it.

I spent nearly half my career as a corporate officer and in-house counsel. I sat in the meetings where a compliance question landed in the same week as a production deadline, and I know which one usually wins that argument. Getting this right early is what stops those two things from competing. Handled on the front end, a permit is a scheduling item. Handled late, it’s a risk to your ability to run the plant.

When does environmental permitting actually come up for a growing business?

Growth changes three things agencies care about. Volume, meaning how much you make and therefore how much you emit, discharge or throw away. Process, meaning what you actually do and what you do it with. And footprint, meaning new buildings, new pavement, new tanks, and new connections to a sewer or a stream.

Any one of those can put you into a program you weren’t in before, or move you into a stricter tier of a program you were already in. A second shift can do it. So can a new coating line, a different solvent, a larger boiler, or a paved lot that changes where your stormwater goes. Thresholds exist in every program, but they vary by state, by program and by facility, so nobody can tell you where yours sit without reading your permit against your operation.

The sequence I see most often is backwards. A company signs the lease, orders the equipment, and then asks whether a permit is required. Reverse it. The permitting answer sets the construction schedule. The construction schedule doesn’t set the permitting answer.

Which agency do I deal with, the state or the federal government?

Most environmental permitting programs are federal in design and delegated to the states to run. Day to day, that means a state agency, state forms and state review times. Local authorities can be in the mix too. If you discharge to a municipal treatment plant, that plant has its own limits and its own permission to give or withhold.

I’m licensed in Missouri and Illinois. Even between two neighboring states, the applications, the review times and the way an agency handles a question are not the same. If you run a plant in one state and you’re opening in another, don’t assume the playbook travels with you.

One project can also need more than one permit. Air, wastewater, stormwater and waste handling are separate programs with separate reviews and separate people. Add zoning and building approvals, which aren’t environmental at all but sit on the same calendar and can stop a project just as effectively.

What does the agency actually want in the application?

An honest technical description of your operation. Inputs and quantities, process steps, equipment, control devices, where things leave the building, and how you’ll measure what leaves. Most of that is engineering rather than law, and a good consultant earns their fee at this stage.

Write the application for the operation you intend to run, not the one you run on a slow Tuesday. What you describe becomes the limit you live under. Understate your throughput and you’ve built your own ceiling, and you’ll be back asking for a modification to buy it back.

Reviewers ask questions, sometimes months in. Answer them in writing, keep every answer consistent with the application, and make sure one person at your company owns the correspondence. Two employees answering the same question two different ways creates a problem that didn’t exist before.

What does it take to keep environmental permitting from becoming a problem later?

A permit isn’t a certificate you frame. It’s a set of ongoing obligations. Limits you have to stay under, monitoring you have to perform, records you have to keep, reports you have to file, and sometimes training and maintenance on a control device. Enforcement activity usually starts with records and reports, not with a dramatic event.

So give the obligations to a named person and put the deadlines on the same calendar as your tax filings. When that person leaves, the calendar goes with the job, not with the employee. The fact that the person who handled it is gone has never worked as an explanation.

Inspections happen, sometimes unannounced. Be straight, produce what’s asked for, and don’t speculate. If a question moves from facts to conclusions about whether you complied, it’s fine to say you’ll follow up in writing. Then follow up in writing.

What happens if I grow past what my permit allows?

Operating outside your permit is a violation on its own, separate from whether anything was harmed. Penalty structures vary by state and by program, and I’m not going to quote numbers at you. In practice the money is rarely the worst part. The worst part is a stop-work order or a production limit while you fix the paperwork.

If you find the problem yourself, say so and correct it. Agencies treat a company that self-identifies and fixes things differently from one that gets caught. Better still, file for the modification before you make the change. That’s the whole argument for bringing environmental permitting into a growth project at the start rather than at the end.

And sometimes the answer is no. A change that requires a long review or a control device you can’t justify may not be worth making at all. You want to know that before the capital leaves the building, not after it’s bolted to the floor.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need the permit before I buy the equipment?

Often you need it before you build or install, and in some programs before the equipment may operate at all. The sequence varies by state and by program. Ask the question before the purchase order goes out, because the answer sets your schedule.

Can I rely on what my equipment vendor tells me about permitting?

Use the vendor for engineering data and treat their permitting opinion as a starting point only. Vendors sell into many states and the rules are not the same in all of them. The regulation and your permit control, and those are what somebody should actually be reading.

We’ve operated for years without a permit. Does that mean we don’t need one?

Not necessarily. It may mean you were under a threshold, or in a category that didn’t require one, or that nobody looked. The safer read is that your current operation hasn’t been tested against the current rules, and growth is exactly the event that tests it.

Talk with Sheldon

I do environmental regulatory and permitting work for businesses that are expanding, changing a process, or dealing with an agency after the fact. Most of it is unglamorous. Read the permit, read the rule, tell the owner what the real schedule is, and keep a growth project from stalling on something that was foreseeable. If you’re planning a change and you aren’t sure what it triggers, that’s a short conversation worth having early. Reach me at skorlin@aegislaw.com.

By Sheldon Korlin, Attorney, AEGIS Law