Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
autonocion.com397 points by atombender 4 hours ago
397 points by atombender 4 hours ago
> The permit, a Texas Pollutant Discharge Elimination System authorization known as TPDES, allowed up to 231,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day to be discharged into an unnamed ditch that flows into Petronila Creek and from there into Baffin Bay, a longtime South Texas saltwater fishing destination.
Ok, so sounds like Tesla got the necessary legal provisions.
> What it did not do, explicitly, was grant Tesla the right to use public or private property for wastewater conveyance.
I'm confused, does Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
> The drainage district that manages the ditch the pipe was discharging into was never notified that the permit existed
This should be on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; they issued the permit, so it should be on them to notify the affected area.
> Tesla also argues that the Eurofins sampling methodology was inappropriate, because the lab placed its sampling equipment in the ditch downstream of the outfall pipe rather than at the outfall itself. The permit requires monitoring at the outfall point, and the company has pointed out that ditch samples can pick up contaminants from sources that have nothing to do with Tesla’s wastewater.
As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
> I'm confused, does Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
If you have a permit to dump wastewater into a river, you are not allowed to dump your wastewater wherever in that river's basin on the assumption that it will eventually flow into the river. You are supposed to use a pipeline for wastewater transfer.
But according to the article the permit is for dumping wastewater into a ditch. And Tesla appears to deliver the wastewater to that ditch by pipe. And it doesn't appear like the pipe is the topic of contention here, but where it ends and what comes out of it. All things that seem to be properly permitted, from what the article is telling us
They have a permit to dump water but not put it in the ditch where the pipe runs.
They need to get it to a body of water, not a ditch. Dumping into the drainage ditch or running a pipe in the drainage ditch requires a separate permit.
The water quality is also questionable. Tesla and the drainage company are at odds on the testing method.
At least that’s my understanding of the situation
Doesn't the article state that "The permit, a Texas Pollutant Discharge Elimination System authorization known as TPDES, allowed up to 231,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day to be discharged into an unnamed ditch..."?
They don’t own the drainage ditch. They can still dump the water into the local watershed/river whatever body of water per the permit you stated.
But the permit is to discharge into a ditch. And that is also the ditch that they are discharging into.
>> Tesla also argues that the Eurofins sampling methodology was inappropriate, because the lab placed its sampling equipment in the ditch downstream of the outfall pipe rather than at the outfall itself. The permit requires monitoring at the outfall point, and the company has pointed out that ditch samples can pick up contaminants from sources that have nothing to do with Tesla’s wastewater.
> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
That's some top notch weasel wording right there. If sampling from the ditch reveals contaminants that are not natural to the area but are the same contaminants that are measured from the output of the pipe, then a natural question could be "are the contaminants leaking from upstream and leaching into the ground run off into the ditch?" which would still be a Tesla problem.
My reading is that Tesla's contention is those contaminants are not coming from their pipe, hence the objection to the measurement being taken from somewhere other than the output of their pipe. And while the contaminants may well be coming from Tesla's pipe, given the apparent lack of coordination between the various governmental agencies involved, it seems reasonable to me to say that they need to sample from the pipe output in order to actually say what Tesla is or isn't putting into the ditch, since apparently they might be able to just walk a few hundred feet further up the ditch and find other discharge pipes they don't know about yet.
> Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
My guess is this is a question of overlapping jurisdictions. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is presumably responsible for water quality, and so gets a say on what kinds of discharge in the state are safe. The drainage district has to manage the actual ditches and water on the ground, so they get a say (or at least notice) of new users of their infrastructure.
Just like how the DOT gets to create rules about locomotives but Railways still get to decide who can run trains on their tracks.
> Just like how the DOT gets to create rules about locomotives but Railways still get to decide who can run trains on their tracks.
Fun fact, in 2005, as of Texas Railroad Commission no longer has anything to do with railroads and moved that oversight to the DoT. The TRC now is only involved with oil&gas. It is one of my favorite dumb things about Texas. Why not just rename the group and eliminate the TRC altogether, oh right, politics.
> allowed up to 231,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day
What I'd like to know is what "treated" means here and whether the pollutants measured in the water are in compliance of that definition.
After all, the problem that there is an important fishing area downstream does not go away, whether there is a permit or not. So in my understanding, the whole reason why the permit could be issued in the first place was the assurance that the water was treated enough to not be a danger to downstream consumers. But pitch black fluid with questionable analysis results doesn't exactly seem like that.
> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
Technically yes, but I think it's somewhat unlikely that there just happens to be a chromium/arsenic/lithium/strontium deposit somewhere along the length of the ditch that would re-pollute Tesla's pristine wastewater and make the readings look bad.
Or at least, the question whether there are any potential other sources for the substances should be easy to answer, by looking at a map or sending someone to check the ditch for any other unexpected pipes.
ggreer did the work for us https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199824
> Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater.
> Hexavalent chromium at 0.0104 milligrams per liter, just above the lab’s reporting limit of 0.01 mg/L. Hexavalent chromium is classified as a known human carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program. It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around.
> Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife.
Some of the elements of note that were detected. These are all well above background levels. The point about not measuring at the outfall is valid, but probably not relevant. Unless we think there are other lithium and hex sources nearby.
The real crime is that a permit was issued at all and that it was not so comprehensive. But that's the beauty of Texas - their citizens love this kind of thing.
Per ggreer's comment [0], there are other potential sources nearby.
It's pretty annoying all told. It invalidates the results; it takes them from "this is clear evidence of a breach" into "maybe it's in breach. Or maybe someone else is. Or maybe both are within their respective limits"
Would Eurofins be able to set up monitoring on Tesla's property?
What other sources would have similar pollutants to a Lithium factory? It seems pretty specific and if there was some other obvious source why wouldn't Tesla point that out?
Hexavalent chromium can come from many industrial sources, including welding stainless steel. If you go to Tesla's lithium refinery in google maps[1] and follow the drainage ditch along highway 77 (to the northeast) about a half mile, you'll see a company called Tex-Isle Processing. They supply steel pipes and coating services for oil drilling.[2] It could be that one of their manufacturing processes creates hexavalent chromium.
In my opinion there isn't enough information to blame anyone for the slightly-above-drinking-water levels of hexavalent chromium. The drainage ditch goes along a highway and a rail line, so pollution could come from all kinds of places.
Ok, that's one of the pollutants...
But I agree, measuring at the end of the ditch was the wrong thing to do if they take issue with that specific factory (though it was the right thing to do to prove a harmful pollution exists in general)
So another measurement directly at the pipe would be in order.
They list 6 pollutants, but only two of them seem relevant to the legality of this.
One is an amount of arsenic that is a quarter of what's allowed in drinking water. So technically, someone dumping drinking water in the ditch could contaminate this measurement.
The other is hexavalent chromium, which is 4% higher than allowed. According to wikipedia that is "indeed one of the more widely used heavy metals in various sectors and industries (metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, etc.) with particular involvement in the metal coating sector" and used in the production of all kinds of dyes, paints, plastics, etc. It can also be formed by welding stainless steel, and is found in drinking water ... that doesn't sound very specific to me.
I don't know where that ditch is, but on google maps the Tesla lithum plant is right next to a place storing drilling equipment outdoors. Runoff from any kind of industry nearby could end up in that ditch. After all, collecting runoff is what ditches are there for
> collecting runoff is what ditches are there for
Sure. What ditches aren't for, and vary greatly wrt, is discharging all inputs out to sea or or a large body of water for "sufficient" dilution.
Ditches can be sealed (concrete lined, with a membrane underneath) or, say, just dirt.
Dirt ditches with a long run filter .. heavier particles drop out, weeds and other organics grab onto various compounds, etc. Those things that filter out and layer into a ditch and can then concentrate over time (subject to terms and conditions).
A reasonable question, that should be asked of any industrial area, is whether dirt ditches, leaky pipes, the whole deal, are accumulating toxins over a decade or more ... and what the impact and remediation plan is for that.
Worst case, ditch line concentrates leach down into a water table close enough to an extraction pump that goes to water food or be drunk by people. (Or later in time earthworks for housing kick up a dust layer that just happens to be mostly "20 years of bad ju-ju")
Not insurmountable, something to be wary of, these things have happened.
>> The permit requires monitoring at the outfall point...
The permit is a license to pollute, but go on:
>> ...and the company has pointed out that ditch samples can pick up contaminants from sources that have nothing to do with Tesla’s wastewater.
Downstream, others are picking up contaminants from a source that has nothing to do with them.
> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
OK, lovely, glad that's settled.
NEXT!
Obviously, discharging "dark and murky" polluted water is bad. But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible:
* Hexavalent chromium at 0.0104 milligrams per liter, just above the lab’s reporting limit of 0.01 mg/L. Hexavalent chromium is classified as a known human carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program. It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around.
* Arsenic at 0.0025 mg/L. That is below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.
The hexavalent chromium is also just barely above the California drinking water standard [1]
[1] https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...
> Arsenic at 0.0025 mg/L
That is well below the noise floor. Like the similarly toxic selenium, arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology. It is possible to be deficient in arsenic, though rare in practice. Natural background levels are far higher in many locales with no adverse effects.
I often see trace quantities of arsenic trotted out by the popular media for scaremongering purposes. Examples like the above are an immediate red flag.
Could you expand on what makes arsenic an essential micronutrient? What are the clinical signs and symptoms of severe arsenic deficiency? I've never heard of this before.
It has no known physiological role in humans. Selenium has similar stuff going on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_biochemistry]
It’s not hard to figure this stuff out yourself.
It is hard. I did some searches before commenting and couldn't find anything about arsenic deficiency. I don't know much about arsenic biochemistry so could you kindly point us to a good source?
Perhaps not. At the same time, when a person makes a claim, and several (or several hundred) people read it, it seems more efficient to ask the person who made the claim to supply the documentation, rather than making the several (hundred) people all do the looking. The looking does not have to be hard for this to be true.
Also, just in general debate terms, the one who makes a claim is the one who has the burden of substantiating it.
If I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?
The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".
The dosage makes the poison - but if it sticks around in the body dilution may slightly alleviate effects but at the cost of more widespread buildup. This is out of my field so I'm not certain if that's a concern here.
In some cases it still is, but we need to emphasize the exceptions, which can be rather serious.
For example, we can hardly "dilute" CFCs or CO2 any more than we did, by putting them into a whopping 5.15×10^18 kg of the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Yet both still cause bad things, because there's no (sufficient) process to break them down or move them to a safe state.
Is that so? The amount of atmosphere stays the same, but we're constantly adding more CO2. So wouldn't this continually reduce the dilution?
Accumulation makes the... what rhymes here?
I like where you're going with this.
"The solution to pollution is dilution, except when accumulation is a violation upon creation"?
Yeah but the volume of water you can release is still limited so does still reduce pollutants if you are running up against that limit.
>> If I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?
It said the permit is for up to a certain amount of water per day. If you're at the volume limit there's no way to dilute by just adding more water.
Unless you run it along a ditch so much of the water, and bad stuff, soaks into the soil before "discharge" at the property line.
That level of arsenic is so low that diluting it with groundwater might cause the arsenic number to go up, depending on where this is located.
That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!
This is completely false.
The ECU turns on the secondary air system and enriches the fuel mixture so the exhaust temperature goes up, heating the catalytic converter rapidly. Catalytic converters must be hot to work, so getting them hot quickly is important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_air_injection
EDIT: OP drove an older truck. In earlier days, the extra air injection into the exhaust was to provide some air for the secondary exhaust gasses to fully burn. It had to be done early in the exhaust where the exhaust gases are hot.
>That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!
I'm sure that people of a certain bent will eat your comment up but that's just not true.
Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.
Emissions have been measured by mass rather than concentration since 1972. So like yeah it "could've been done" but standards before that were light enough that they could just screw with other things that add $0 to the BOM to clean it up enough to pass.
> Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.
My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter, only a muffler. It featured not one, but two air pumps, each feeding a set of pipes that led to metal tubes which entered the exhaust manifold opposite each exhaust port. Another odd thing about that truck was it had a choke lever, something I thought was long gone by 1988, and was a pain to start in the winter.
Perhaps other vehicles had a cat but this truck certainly did not.
> My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter,
Catalytic converters were required on most vehicles starting in 1975 in the US and the requirement was expanded to cover all vehicles in the early 80s.
Your truck was modified by someone.
Medium duties are weird beasts indeed.
Well, FWIW the air pumps still can -help- with unburnt fuel...
It's not as good as a Cat for emissions but it's better than nothing, so they actually started being used before Cats; they just are used different now.
In 1988 the factory put a cat in the exhaust. It also would have had fuel injection and a computer, and thus no choke. In short this truck was very much not stock (or possibly you are not in the US?) and so it is interesting but not helpful for the discussion.
350ish (or less) + 4spd trucks kinda fell out of favor over the course of the 70s for bigger engines and 5spds (usually with a 2spd rear end but I digress). I'm sure you could still get one, but who would when you could get something better on the lot for the same money.
Sounds like someone swapped a 70s-80s engine from a lighter application in.
I don't think that truck would've had manual choke from the factory. Lots of stuff could've happened over the years.
The amount of air your engine breathes is monumental compared to what the smog pump moves. The math of dilution just doesn't work. What does work is pissing a light stream of oxygen (remember, not much of that coming out of the engine, especially on warm up while it runs rich) to help the catalyst burn those hydrocarbons off of itself a wee bit faster.
I'm not sure if an 80s gas MDT would've had cats from the factory.
The 6000 was a commercial truck. It appears to have had a carburetor for most if not all of the 1980s.
Is that what a "smog pump" is (was)? LOL. I had heard the term but never knew what it was.
Along the same lines then as other emissions equipment that reduced fuel economy but achieved the ppm criteria in the exhaust. Yes, let's address pollution by burning more fuel.
Presumably. But they are also limited on the volume of wastewater they are allowed to discharge, so it probably wouldn't be an ideal "solution".
Those levels are low enough that they might be coming from the water going into the plant.
Arsenic and hexavalent chromium are both naturally occurring substances in low quantities. You can pull uncontaminated water out of the ground in remote locations and detect low levels of arsenic and hexavalent chromium.
That hexavalent chromium number would be just barely about California's strict limit for drinking water, but it's 1/10th of the EPA's limit.
Out of curiosity, I checked the water records re: arsenic.
Test wells for the region in question have had arsenic levels several times that being discussed here for years. In fact, the water district started failing Federal arsenic standards last summer[0] and has received three formal violation notices.
They were nearly in violation a year before the lithium plant even opened. At least in terms of arsenic, the levels coming out of the plant are significantly lower than background.
[0] https://www.kristv.com/running-dry/ncwcid-3-gets-third-arsen...
My guess is the hexavalent chromium is leeched from plated metals in processing equipment. Very common plating substance and was more common before restrictions were put in place.
> It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around.
more about PG&E contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
Sure; if you run a "hazardous substance processing" company, you just take up an enormous amount of clean water and enrich it with the maximum amounts of arsenic, chromium, etc, and charge your clients a nice penny.
What about:
Strontium at 1.17 mg/L
That seems like a misprint? Strontium is a fission byproduct. And that seems like a high amount if that's milligrams per liter.
It is a normal metal. For example, the intense red color in fireworks is commonly strontium nitrate.
I think it is used in small quantities for industrial applications like welding, which seems a more likely source here.
Not really; strontium is quite common in the crust. In the oceans it occurs in the single-digit mg/L. This isn't a meaningful datapoint.
The entire article doesn't show particularly concerning findings and the protests read more like nimbyism than environmental concern. Industrial processes have some non-zero level of impact and complaining when someone runs one that's not very polluting at all is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it's just an attempt to outsource all the pollution to china, which is fine for many things (I'd rather they were polluted than us) but not critical minerals.
Yes just searched it and found:
While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium is not hazardous to health at low levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium
I guess I didn't realize that strontium had a stable naturally-occuring isotope.
There are only two elements below the actinides that have no stable isotopes (technetium and promethium).
I include bismuth as stable even though technically it is radioactive with an extraordinarily long half life.
Every element up to and including bismuth, excluding technetium and promethium, have stable primordial isotopes (i.e., have been on Earth since it was made), and in addition, thorium, uranium, and maybe plutonium (Pu-244 is on the very edge, so it's not clear if any primordial nuclei of it remain) also have primordial isotopes. Every element with bismuth or higher atomic number has no stable isotopes, and the elements from astatine through neptunium naturally occur largely via decay sequences of uranium or natural nuclear reactions in uranium ore.
Nuclear fission reactions tend to result in the daughter nuclei being considerably smaller than the mother nucleus--like a 70/30 or 60/40 split, which means that the fission products of uranium are firmly in the range of elements that have stable isotopes. (Although due to larger elements being richer in neutrons, most fission products have too many neutrons, hence undergo radioactive decay themselves).
yaaaay hexavalent chromium and arsenic, the classics. Are they melting or plating something? Or is it just ores being ores?
Based on other comments, the levels are well below drinking water in the area - and probably within safe drinking water limits.
But does the amount per liter matter? The quantity matters too right? How much of these substances are being released in total? And since it’s into a drainage ditch that goes past what looks like farmland, does the higher local concentration cause more problems for the population in the area?
I think it does. Crops pull up a set amount of water. If it's concentrated, then they'll pull up a lot of heavy metals. If it's at very low levels, then they won't.
nah, there is no reason they should be discharging any hexavalent chromium, we have better, less insanely toxic ways of chroming things. trivalent chromium is much less toxic, hexavalent chromium should be banned world-wide.
what's more, i'm not finding a reason that tesla would need hexavalent chromium in battery production, which leads me to speculate that this is waste from one of their other car factories where they presumably have a hexavalent chrome line (it's a cheaper and more robust process than trivalent chrome) and they are mixing/discharging on purpose at the limit at this plant.
I used to work in a factory that did chrome plating (I didn't work in that area, but since it was the same building), as part of my mandatory training before I was allowed to step foot in the building I had to learn there was a sewage plant just for the output of that line and if I had to dispose of waste water for any reasons I had to make sure I got it into the right system. Our sewage system couldn't treat toilet water, the city system can't treat chrome waste. (my waste disposal was limited to toilet and washing my hands - as you would expect from an engineer, but I still had to know about the system just in case)
“Just barely above the California drinking water standard” is a really long way to say “past the limit”
please stop please stop and educate yourself. I dislike that this is the top message in a forum where we’re supposed to dig deeper.
The US regulatory standards are terrible. https://www.loudounwater.org/information-hexavalent-chromium...
The actual limits are orders of magnitude lower. Educate yourself.
> But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible
> just above the lab’s reporting limit of 0.01 mg/L.
> just barely above the California drinking water standard
I ... just can't even say anything to this.
Are we doing "i just cant even" posting in 2026? Wastewater is not expected to be safe as drinking water, so it meeting the standards for drinking water shows how safe it is. If you have a reasonable argument to the contrary then please post it.
This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?
How about when it enters the food chain and starts to accumulate? Will the elements say that "we're under legal limits, and accumulate slowly, so we will act nice and don't poison the organism we're in?"
Love that way of thinking.
Emissions regulations are a balancing act. Industrial processes are inherently filthy. If you want copper, gold, lithium, or anything else that makes up the modern world, somewhere on earth was dirtied for that to be possible, and some of the pollution will get into the surroundings because zero emissions simply isn't possible. So we set certain levels of "acceptable emissions" as a balancing act.
I also agree that emissions should be tighter, but the location question is more interesting, because we can also choose where emissions happen.
For example, we might choose them to happen near cities/factories so the products are close to where they're used. We've mostly stopped doing that since the industrial revolution for pretty good reasons though. We could place them in the pristine landscapes not otherwise used by humans, like national parks. That's unpopular for hopefully obvious reasons. We could place them in sparsely inhabited deserts abroad, as Europeans did [0], before we collectively decided colonialism was a bad thing.
And lastly, we could place them in figurative deserts away from conservation land and people like monoculture farmland, but then we get to your question.
So, what's left? What are you suggesting as a better alternative?
> we're under legal limits
That's the definition of law. As long as it is legal it won't be charged.
What if the law is formulated to be convenient for corporations and not to protect the public and/or the environment?
Then we should work together as a society to fix the law and make sure it's applied evenly. Hard to do, but necessary.
Is there an alternative?
> So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?
> Love that way of thinking.
I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise. So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).
It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
It kind of falls apart when large companies can lobby and bribe the people in charge of writing and enacting laws to make exception and write around their problem areas. Or can just make strategic donations to ease any risks of enforcement. Or collude to make sure the fine for whatever infraction is well below the profit margin of doing said infraction.
I don't care to argue semantics, just pointing out your reply was as hollow as your criticism to the person saying legal doesn't mean safe. It's a pretty reasonable thing to draw attention to methinks...
>I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise.
It might be news to you, but the laws don't dictate what's fine, and what isn't.
Aside from things like slavery being legal and homosexuality being illegal in the past, I'll note that it's perfectly legal for you to drink bleach, but it wouldn't really be fine for you to do that.
(I hope we can agree that advising people to do something "fine" isn't rude, but telling someone to go drink bleach would be) .
> So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).
So, to boot, "it's fine as long as it's legal" doesn't apply to those things, youthinks.
Also, "we" is a peculiar pronoun that needs a lot of expansion, considering that the "we" negatively affected by "not fine" things isn't the same "we" that benefits from them, and it's the latter "we" that has direct influence on legislation.
Some interesting terms to read up on include "negative externality" and "corruption" (assuming youreads).
>It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
If we turn to historical examples, the French Revolution certainly provides an example for alternative ways to resolve disparities between what's legal and what's fine.
There are plenty of others, but that question wasn't asked in good faith, methinks, and so doesn't deserve a more in-depth answer.
It's also a complete fiction in a world dominated by commercial interests, entrenched lobby groups, corrupt politicians and regulatory capture.
Is there an alternative?
We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.
I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.
I think a look at other countries would do well. There are many with much tighter regulations (e.g. EU countries, Singapore, Japan) and they seem to have good results with that.
> We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked.
I think prevention of pollution is one area where very tight regulation is absolutely needed, and this seems to be an argument for that.
Of course regulation can be weaponized and used as a tool to serve entrenched interests as well - but this is then more a problem with the overall political system. Also, I think a proof that this is the case is necessary instead of assuming it by default.
Dunno, maybe strive to release no pollutants at all? Then we wouldn't need all the pesky big government overreach.
Taking this as a good faith engineering argument. What does that mean? What do you constitute a pollutant and how much is zero?
I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution?
The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.
In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot more than 1 atom of arsenic per glass. In the far future humanity might obtain the technology to create water with literally no pollutants in it but that age has yet to arrive.
How would you do that, assuming you wanted to keep up the material standard of living that the people you care about are used to?
Um, I'm pretty sure we can all get behind corps striving for the ideal. Fines align incentives.
Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?
To exist is to pollute.
But you can pollute sustainably. e.g.: Composting, biodegradable materials, etc.
or unsustainably: e.g.: PFAS. For bonus points you can do internal research and hide the reports detailing the effects accurately.
Arsenic and lead occur naturally through the food chain. If the levels of discharge are not significantly above the normal levels (and they aren't) then it's harmless.
They are still not harmless. They are normal. However if they are at all above natural (that is your input levels) you should treat and remove them. It is not unusual for the output of a sewage treatment plant to be cleaner water than what goes into your drinking water system.
From a quick lookaround, it looks like a lot of water sources in the area have similar natural levels of arsenic. I could not find chromium content information, and it's plausible that it can be leached from stainless steel.
These are pretty much the only two concerning contaminants. Everything else in the report is just fear-mongering, like the BS about manganese.
What a ridiculous comment for something that is obviously extremely +EV for the environment.
Wonderful to see so many people here embracing skepticism when it comes to government institutions, bureaucrats, and their "experts".
I mean... if it's got a similar amount of toxin X to drinking water... then it's probably not making things much worse.
There is lead in dirt!
The upper limit does not mean that water actually has that amount in it regularly.
> What [the wastewater discharge permit] did not do, explicitly, was grant Tesla the right to use public or private property for wastewater conveyance. The drainage district that manages the ditch the pipe was discharging into was never notified that the permit existed.
I find it kinda worrying that so much of the legal weight of this case doesn't seem to be about the untreated wastewater discharge at all but only about the detail that they used a county-owned ditch to do so.
So if Tesla had dug their own ditch or built the pipe all the way to Petronila Creek, the discharge would have been no problem?
(Well, that's not completely true as the additional pollutants aren't covered by the permit either - but without the ditch issue, probably no one would have commissioned an analysis of the water?)
Can a big and rich company be fined for some minor technicality? Maybe! If the cost of the attempt is lower than the amount of the possible fine, why not try and find out? This may sound cynical, but this also one of the driving forces that often keep big companies from breaking rules.
Jason Bevan, Senior Manager of Site Operations at the Robstown plant, said in a written statement that the company “routinely monitors and tests its permitted wastewater discharge” and “remains in complete compliance with all requirements of its state-issued wastewater discharge permit, including applicable water quality standards.”
What an awful character. I am thankful I don't have to deceive or tell half-truths for a paycheck. The dispute is that they are discharging things not listed in the permit, and their response is that they don't exceed the limits of the things that are listed in the permit.
I also fault the government employee who submits a sample for testing from a lithium plant and doesn't check a box "test for lithium".
How is that a half truth? If you read the article it’s clear that this discharge is fully permitted and legal. All the substances they portray so shockingly were found at barely detectable levels.
I read the whole article and I don’t really understand what is being criticized, if not manufacturing itself. Do people think it’s possible to make a massive battery factory with zero industrial waste water output? Or do they think factories should only be in poor countries where they won’t have to think about them? If batteries stopped existing most people would be very unhappy, why be unwilling to pay the full cost of those substantial benefits?
There is my question - is this really normal or not? Tesla gets a lot of hate in the press (their CEO is a jerk), but that doesn't mean everything they do is evil. If these are things that come in via their drinking water system and then go out then I'm fine (it would be better if they would filter this but it is unreasonable to ask them to), if there are things they are adding they need to take care.
Not OP but, half truth is here "remains in complete compliance with all requirements of its state-issued wastewater discharge permit" and yet... "Neither hexavalent chromium nor arsenic appears in Tesla’s TCEQ discharge permit as an allowable pollutant." Both which were found in the waste water. The original test did not test for those, so I guess what the guy was saying was true at a time?
The permit also didn’t list strawberry bubblegum. The levels of these pollutants were found to be similar to background levels. Where do you think arsenic comes from?
If the Texas regulators are asleep at the wheel then be mad at them. Businesses are guided by laws, but there’s no allegation any laws were broken. I’m no Tesla partisan but this just feels like mindless ragebait.
neat trick is to realize you dont have to pick sides.
you can get mad at tesla for dumping wastewater with stuff they dont have a permit for, and you can be mad at the regulators failing to regulate.
But there is no evidence that they are dumping stuff they don’t have a permit for. Finding 1% over background levels in a sample tells you literally nothing.
Industrial waste is called such for a reason.
> Industrial waste is called such for a reason.
Which is why you shouldn't dump it in a river used for fishing? (Or any river for that matter)
I don't think you understand that people pee lithium into their toilets too. But you didn't just read an article riling you up to being mad at the municipal sewage industry so you aren't mad at it at the moment.
Yes, and you shouldn't dump untreated municipal wastewater into rivers either? That's what we have treatment plants for. I don't get what that has to do with anything.