The Maine Conservation Law Foundation announced Thursday its intention to file lawsuits against an Eastport company and the town of Freeport for illegally polluting public waters.

The Engelhard Corp. factory, located on the Eastport waterfront, and the Freeport Sewer District will be named as defendants in actions brought under the Federal Clean Water Act.

Earlier this week, the environmental group released a report criticizing the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s enforcement of the act in many locations.

The suits target what the group calls typical violators in Maine. The intention is to pressure the DEP to do a better job policing water discharges and to send a message to other polluters, Chris DeScherer, a staff advocate for the group’s Rockland office said Thursday.

“As we go forward, we expect that there could be more litigation,” he said. “There are a tremendous number of facilities out there in violation.”

Hundreds of corporations and municipal water treatment plants hold legal permits under the Clean Water Act, stating when and how they may discharge waste into Maine’s rivers and the Atlantic Ocean.

An “alarming” number of these facilities have violated the terms of their permits without ever being penalized by the DEP, DeScherer said.

The average municipal wastewater-treatment plant in Maine exceeded legal discharge levels of pollutants in five of the last 12 months, the report said.

On Thursday, the group filed a notice of its intent to sue. This formality allows 60 days for environmentalists, the DEP and the defendants to try to reach a solution before going to court.

The department has not yet decided on a course of action, but director of enforcement Jim Dusch on Thursday rebutted some of CLF’s claims.

His department handles 342 permitted dischargers, who collectively have the potential to cause as many as 400,000 violations in a single year, he said.

The DEP adheres to a different philosophy than CLF. It has the authority to determine whether to issue a penalty or not, and sometimes in the case of minor violations without environmental consequences, it seeks only to remedy the problem, he said.

Engelhard Corp. produces a product known as “pearl essence” from fish scales. The end product is nontoxic and used to make cosmetics iridescent.

However, the manufacturing process uses strong solvents. The discharge stream going into Broad Cove is comparatively small, but highly toxic, said DeScherer.

“The best way I can describe it is that if you had a garbage can 99-percent filled with clean water, and you added less than a percent of Engelhard’s effluent, [all the water] would be toxic,” DeScherer said.

CLF called the company a “habitual violator.”

“They clearly know that this is a problem,” DeScherer said of state and federal regulators. “I think that often these smaller facilities fall between the cracks. It’s just human nature.”

Dusch disagreed, saying that Engelhard’s violations are primarily federal matters, and that his staff does not discriminate by the size of a company.

Neither a spokesman from Engelhard’s local office nor staff at its New Jersey headquarters could be reached for comment late Thursday afternoon.

Freeport’s Municipal Water District has also racked up a long list of violations, according to CLF. The facility has been fined by the DEP, and the agency is working with the town to reduce the discharge of bacteria, including dangerous fecal coliform.

The facility and the DEP have been struggling to remedy a problem with bacteria regrowing in treated wastewater before it is discharged into the Harraseeket River.