Coming clean: CLFs Clean Water enforcement project holds polluters accountable, one business at a time.

• Position: COVER STORY

Aboat trip through the Mystic River Watershed--which spans 76 square miles and 22 communities north of Boston--reveals scenery both beautiful and troubling. A great blue heron gracefully taking flight contrasts sharply with hulking freighters offloading cargo. Ifs the most urbanized watershed in Massachusetts and one of the most polluted. So when a neighborhood group approached CLF in 2010 with concerns about stormwater runoff from a large scrap metal facility, the organization agreed to take a closer look.

"At this facility, there were towering mountains of scrap that were much higher than the privacy fences that surrounded them," said Zak Griefen, CLF's Environmental Enforcement Litigator. When rain and snow falls on those scrap piles, the runoff drains into the Mystic River, carrying pollutants from those metals with it. This facility, said Griefen, "didn't have and never applied for a permit to discharge pollutants, so it was blatantly in violation of the Clean Water Act. When we looked at similar facilities nearby, we found that none of them had the required permits, either."

That initial research led to the recognition of a much larger and serious problem all across New England: Thousands of industrial sites, from small boat marinas to sand and gravel pits to junkyards, line the shores of the region's inland and coastal waters. And, while many of them discharge waste into those waters, few hold the permits to do so legally. The pollutants coming from these unregulated facilities--lead, zinc, and phosphorus among them--are some of the most toxic and damaging to our waterways, many of which, like the Mystic, are already severely compromised from industrial pollution and contamination.

The impacts of this unchecked pollution run deeper than the harm to individual waterways, however. "Without permits, these facilities are flying under the radar of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state regulators," said Christopher Kilian, Director of CLF's Clean Water and Healthy Forests program. "These agencies are working to clean up our public waters, and they rely on self-reported information from industry to implement the law. When a large chunk of that community isn't' permitted, that creates a gaping hole in the data being used to make decisions about the health of our waters."

At the same time, the sheer volume of unpermitted polluters makes it difficult for EPA to go after them on its own. "Enforcement officials need all the...