Photograph by Lance Adkins
This month, the sprawling Ineos plastics factory along the Ohio River in Addyston will begin a months-long process of shutting down and laying off its workers. It won’t be coming back. “The plant closing will be permanent,” its owner told the state of Ohio in its layoff notice.
The looming death of the plant has created an existential crisis in the 900-plus residents here. Can this fiercely independent village survive when it loses its largest source of tax revenue? Does it raise taxes on its already needy residents? Does it join the city of Cincinnati or the surrounding township?
“We have a lot of options that we really need to talk about,” says Dan Pillow, a lifelong resident and village council member.
It’s easy to miss Addyston. Just west of the city limits of Cincinnati, U.S. 50 runs right past the town with barely a stoplight to slow anyone down. But it’s impossible to miss the hulking chemical plant on the road’s south side. The plant and its surrounding property consume about a third of the town’s real estate. Its plastics-making infrastructure sprawls for a full half mile, with dozens of towers, each rising more than 100 feet, and more than a dozen storage tanks marking its boundaries.
The imposing edifice is still known locally as “the Monsanto plant”; that company owned it for more than 40 years. Since 2007, it’s been the property of British industrial conglomerate Ineos Group, which owns 44 other manufacturing facilities in 18 countries.
The taxes collected from this global giant and the people who work there account for about a third of Addyston’s $1.26 million operating budget. With no new sources of revenue in the offing and very few places to cut costs—the village employs just five people—the closure could mean the end of this self-governing community.
The dilemma brings into focus the viability of small towns and villages around here. With the population in many of them declining, tax revenue stagnant, and the costs to provide essential services steadily rising, can they survive? Should they?
Photograph by Lance Adkins
Like many small towns, Addyston persists with a stubborn pride. They are of the big city of Cincinnati, but not part of it. They have history, traditions, laws, leaders, and neighbors. But times are getting tougher.
Addyston’s fire department has been gone for years, shut down in 1999. Its police department was decommissioned in 2024. Miami Township and Hamilton County have picked up those services. Its elementary school closed in 2005. Monitors on the school’s roof had shown the air was too toxic for children to breathe. The big chemical plant, just 200 yards away across U.S. 50, was blamed. (The school has since been torn down.)
Addyston has a part-time mayor and a part-time village council, a couple of maintenance workers, and a clerk. It has a U.S. Post Office, where everyone picks up their mail because there’s no mail delivery in Addyston. There are a couple of bars and a handful of churches.
In the November 2024 presidential election, 310 village residents voted. At some point, they may be asked to vote on dissolving their river town and either annexing to Cincinnati or becoming part of Miami Township. But that time is not here yet. “Our objective is to save our village, make it sustainable, and go from there,” says Pillow.
He was born in Addyston, lived there all his life (except for his military service), has twice been elected mayor, and at the age of 78 still serves on village council and is active in the community. As he drives me around town, it seems he knows everyone he passes, waving hello or honking the horn in greeting.
He pauses often to point out former village landmarks. The plant’s property once housed a small neighborhood called Hopkinsville, where houses were built on stilts to lift them out of the river’s floodplain. There’s the old Burr Oak School, which became a municipal building and is now a residence. An old clapboard Episcopal church, modest steeple still intact, is for sale. The old firehouse is now used to store equipment. There is “The Bricks,” a four-story, 19th century relic that once housed a movie theater and a general store.
Veterans Park is an immaculately maintained pocket park, a memorial to Addyston residents who served in the armed forces. Pillow’s name is listed there, along with his brother Kenneth’s. Their older brother Samuel served in the Korean conflict, and their father, Samuel Elbert, saw action in World War II. For Memorial Day weekend, village workers install 10-foot-high American flags in post holes along both sides of the mile-long route of Main Street.
Addyston honors its past. Memorial bricks outside the municipal building carry the names of mayors, council members, treasurers, clerks, fire marshals, and chiefs of police going back to its 1892 founding.
It’s always been a working-class enclave. Even a 1943 guide to Cincinnati and its suburbs published by the Federal Writers Project called Addyston “a grimy little industrial town.” It’s a hardscrabble, mostly white Appalachian burg. It’s distrustful of outsiders, and it’s been the scene of some headline grabbing scandals.
When U.S. 50 was built, it skirted Addyston, bypassing the village’s small business district. Main Street dead ends without connecting to the highway.
Photograph by Lance Adkins
The streets of Addyston climb steeply out of the floodplain. The neighborhood’s topography, gravity, water, and neglect have buckled some streets and closed others. As neighborhood demographics have changed over time, some of the houses have been abandoned. Others, such as Pillow’s childhood home, have been torn down. In some places, with vines growing around sagging, weather-beaten houses, Addyston resembles an Appalachian “holler.”
Former mayor Gary O’Connor grew up there and got out when he enlisted in the 101st Airborne, stationed at Ft. Campbell. “I wanted to leave everything behind and just walk away from it,” he says, but the small town called him back. “I slowly came back around.” He got married, and he and his wife fixed up his family home, sold it, then bought a property on First Street and built a home there. That was more than 30 years ago. “We raised our family there,” he says. “Our commitment was to this town. I’m anchored in here.”
He suspects the plant will sit empty for years, a reminder of days gone by. “They’re going to leave this village high and dry with a hazmat-contaminated grounds,” he says. “Ineos is not the village’s friend.”
Photograph by Lance Adkins
Addyston and industry have been connected for at least 150 years. Its strategic location on the Ohio first attracted coal shippers. By the 1870s, two coal elevators on the river loaded and shipped so much of the combustible material that the place was known as “Coal City.” In 1889, the sale of riverfront land to an immigrant from Canada, Matthew Addy, set the stage for the town’s future.
His obituary called Addy “one of Cincinnati’s most successful businessmen.” After migrating from Montreal to booming 19th century Cincinnati, he went into business selling cotton. He ultimately didn’t see a future in it, but the pig iron business looked attractive as a rapidly industrializing country needed building materials. He built the Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. on the banks of the river, importing iron from the South, smelting it, and shipping it northward to be used in water pipes, gas pipes, steam pipes, and blast furnaces. He was the “Cincinnati Iron King,” and his Addyston plant was “by far the largest and most extensive of any that has been added to the manufacturing industries of Cincinnati in recent years,” according to a contemporary account. The foundry employed 1,400 in its earliest days, and “iron masters and mechanical engineers agree that there are few, if any, more perfect in operation in America.”
Addyston grew around Addy’s factory and was incorporated in 1891. Housing was built for the growing number of workers, many of the homes made from Sears kits. The population grew to 1,700.
Addyston Pipe and Steel evolved into U.S. Pipe and Steel. After a long run, the company closed in 1950. But this Ohio River industrial site was not quiet for long. Monsanto bought the property and began making plastics for a postwar America that was buying up refrigerators, cars, and houses and incorporating the lightweight, durable material into everything. In the 1960s, the plant was expanded to feed “the fast-growing market for plastic packages,” Monsanto’s 1965 annual report boasted.
Consolidations, mergers, and acquisitions happen often in the chemical industry, and the plant changed in hands beginning in 1995, when Monsanto was sold to Bayer. Then a Bayer subsidiary, Lanxess, operated the plant beginning in 2005. Ineos bought the site in 2007. The companies all made basically the same thing: a particular variety of plastic called ABS that can be shaped, molded, and extruded and is used in lots of things we touch every day, including car dashboards and bumpers, mobile phones, computer keyboards, luggage, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and sporting goods.
ABS stands for acrylonitrile butadiene and styrene, the chemical building blocks of the polymer product the factory produces. Each of those chemicals can cause cancer in people, the International Agency for Research on Cancer says.
This massive plant has been leaking these chemicals for years, as well as discharging them legally into the air through vents and pipes. In September 2024, a rail tanker filled with styrene bound for the plant began leaking on a siding in neighboring Cleves as the car awaited transport. About 200 homes in the vicinity, the Three Rivers School District, and a Kroger store were evacuated. People were asked to stay indoors. Callers to 911 reported a strong odor like spray paint or nail polish remover. That evening, the leak was brought under control, and evacuation orders were lifted the following day.
But the plant itself has been emitting styrene and the other cancer-causing chemicals for years. In 2023, the Ineos plant emitted into the air 24,260 pounds of styrene, 9,236 pounds of acrylonitrile, and 3,700 pounds of butadiene, according to its annual report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Those figures were much lower than in previous years, as the plant was already scaling back production.
The styrene evacuations, as well as the closure of Meredith Hitchens Elementary School, caused O’Connor to wonder what had been happening to long-time residents like himself. “It was so bad that they closed the school, but it’s not so bad that you could live here your whole life,” he says. “I guess it’s OK for those of us who’ve been living here pretty much our whole lives.”
A 2006 report from the Ohio Department of Health showed the incidence of cancer in Addyston was far higher than expected in the general population. Indeed, the town has had a love-hate relationship with its imposing industrial neighbor, no matter who the owner was.
Three accidental releases of the ABS chemicals in 2004 and 2005 led the state health department to install air monitors on the school’s roof. “The nature of the chemicals released and the occurrence of three of these release events in the short period of time were of major concern to the Ohio Department of Health and Ohio EPA,” an Ohio EPA report said.
In 2009, Ineos and former owner Lanxess agreed to pay a $3.1 million fine to the state and federal governments and Hamilton County air pollution agency to settle a lawsuit over alleged violations of multiple laws, including the Clean Air Act. The village of Addyston received nothing from the settlement.
The environmental agencies said the company failed to monitor and stop leaks of hazardous air pollutants that exceeded legal limits. Ineos agreed to spend up to $2 million to upgrade its environmental controls.
As the plant winds down and eventually closes, the question is: What becomes of it? In an e-mail, the company states, “The safe and responsible decommissioning of the site will occur through 2026 and potentially into early 2027.” Production of ABS plastics is scheduled to end August 31, and “limited resin production will continue into the third quarter of 2026.”
On its website, the company says, “Ineos puts safety, health, and environmental performance top of the agenda at every business team and board meeting.” But the company did not respond to questions about how it plans to decommission the plant, whether it will be demolished, if the real estate will be sold, and what type of cleanup, if any, will be undertaken. It did not make a representative available for an interview.
As the village considers its future, one option is being absorbed into surrounding Miami Township. Jim Brett, the township administrator, wonders what he may be getting into if the township takes on a vacant 130-acre chemical plant. “The biggest thing for us is what’s going to happen with the Ineos facility,” he says.
As a generator of hazardous waste, Ineos is required to follow detailed closure instructions issued by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency that include properly disposing of all hazardous waste and decontaminating equipment and the soil. So far, it appears the company has not filed a plan for closing the site.
Brett is also concerned about assuming responsibility for the village water supply. Addyston is one of only a few towns in Hamilton County that operates its own water system. And the two wells that supply Addyston’s water are on the chemical plant’s property. The wells are old, the supply lines are leaky, and the storage tanks on high ground to the north are caked with sediment. “Addyston needs to look for another more reliable water source,” the Ohio EPA said in a May 2025 letter to village officials.
Ineos owns and operates 10 wells on the site, and their pumps, far more powerful than the village’s old equipment, pull water from the groundwater for use in its industrial operations. The Addyston wells pump water from an aquifer below the bed of the Ohio River. When the plant shuts down and its industrial pumps cease operating, there’s concern that groundwater from the plant property will migrate into the village wells. That was the topic of a study done for Ohio EPA, which concluded that keeping the Ineos wells pumping is the best option for keeping potentially contaminated water out of the village water supply.
Addyston already has an emergency connection to Cincinnati Water Works, but the connection “was observed to be totally flooded . . . and appears to not work as intended,” the OEPA said in a June letter to Addyston Mayor Lisa Mear.
While Brett is doing some homework to prepare for Addyston becoming part of Miami Township, he’s supporting the village’s current posture of remaining independent. “We’d like to see the village survive,” he says.
Another option is annexation to the city of Cincinnati, since Addyston’s neighbor to the east is the city’s Sayler Park neighborhood. But at a February village council meeting on the subject, no one spoke in favor of annexation and several residents vehemently opposed it, mostly due to a potential tax increase for Addyston residents.
The village council, or village citizens through a petition, would need to request annexation, which Cincinnati City Council would then pass or deny. Addyston voters ultimately would have to approve annexation.
For now, says Mear, village leadership wants to remain independent. “We’re going to hunker down for a while, I guess, and push forward,” she says. “The council wants to remain our own jurisdiction. So we have to take a look at how that’s possible.”
Although the plant and the village have a symbiotic relationship, the reality is that production and employment there have been shrinking for a while. Only 82 workers are left to be laid off, Ineos officials say. The Addyston plant has been operating only to “address niche demands” for its products, as its technology is outdated and no longer in use by most similar plastics plants in the world. The company has expanded an ABS plant in Mexico, and the 130-acre Addyston plant is dwarfed by its other facilities.
When the shutdown finally comes, it could mean a turning point for this village. Because fewer people work there, income tax revenue has been dwindling for some time, allowing the village time to adjust its finances. When operations cease, the factory will no longer produce the volatile chemicals that it’s vented into the air and discharged into the water for decades. It may literally be a breath of fresh air.
When the school was torn down, Dan Pillow spearheaded an effort to transform the acreage into a park, which was inaugurated with a grand opening in June. When the plant goes silent, it’ll be safe for kids to run around the park’s expanse, climb the playground equipment, and inhale the air. It could spell a new beginning for this company town.
There will be more debates about what to do, and Addyston’s handful of elected leaders will need to make some hard decisions. But whatever they decide, the people of this tiny Ohio River village will have the final say.
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