Indiana Air Pollution Control Regulations

Rule 17, Industrial Solvent Cleaning Operations, applies to all screen-printing operations in Lake and Porter Counties with actual VOC emissions greater than or equal to 3 tons on a 12-month rolling period before consideration of controls must comply with the entire rule.  Exempt facilities do need to maintain monthly records of solvent usage. 

This applicability threshold is solely based on facility emissions from solvent cleaning operations.  All screen printing facilities in Lake County and Porter County with 12-month rolling VOC emissions equal to or greater than 3 tons must use cleaning solvents that contain no more than 4.2 pounds of VOC per gallon OR solvents and/or solvent solutions that have a VOC composite partial vapor pressure at or below 8mmHg at 20 degrees Celsius. Facilities located outside this two-county area do not need to comply with these requirements.

Any facility that exceeds the threshold of 3 tons of actual VOC emissions on a 12-month rolling basis must maintain the following records on a monthly basis:

• Name and identification of each cleaning material and associated cleaning activity
• The VOC content, in pounds per gallon, as applied or the VOC composite partial vapor pressure of the solvents or solvent used for the specified industrial solvent cleaning operation

To show that emissions are below the 3 ton per year on a 12-month rolling basis, facilities may keep material use records or calculate their VOC emissions. Material use below 768 gallons ensures that VOC emissions will not exceed 3 tons per year on a 12-month rolling basis. Because these material use limits are very conservative, if they are exceeded, a facility may still be below the 3 ton per year on a 12-month rolling basis threshold, but this would have to be demonstrated using calculations.  The following operations are exempt from the rule:

• Stripping of cured coatings, cured ink, or cured adhesives.
• Cleaning operations in printing prepress or graphic arts prepress areas, including the cleaning of film processors, color scanners, plate processors, film cleaning, and plate cleaning.
• Cleaning operations at digital printing presses.