This story was originally published by The Current GA.
On a late February evening, as workers streamed out of the Hyundai site toward the interstate, tanker trucks marked “non-potable water” joined the traffic headed north on U.S. 280.
For months, the companies building Hyundai’s electric vehicles and the batteries to power them have trucked millions of gallons of wastewater from the manufacturing facility in Ellabell to private treatment facilities, both in Georgia and beyond state lines. That’s after Savannah city authorities found excessive levels of heavy metals from the plant’s wastewater that violated its permit, according to city officials and documents.
Correspondence between Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America and Savannah officials shows that the car manufacturer and its suppliers have struggled with wastewater processing and disposal since September 2024. Permit violations have forced the company to abandon treatment in Coastal Georgia and instead truck industrial wastewater to sites in Jacksonville and Goose Creek, South Carolina, among other places, documents show.
The difficulties illustrate the challenges local communities face from Hyundai’s rapid pace to open Georgia’s largest economic development project. Bryan County is building the $129 million North Bryan County Water Reclamation Facility across I-16 from the Hyundai site to accommodate the plant’s industrial waste, but it won’t be complete until the end of 2025. However, HMGMA, the legal entity in charge of manufacturing and permitting at the site, needed water as well as wastewater treatment when the Ellabell site started assembling vehicles last September.
Yet two temporary measures — first to have Savannah treat the industrial wastewater and then to have a Richmond Hill facility handle it — have failed, according to Ogeechee Riverkeeper Damon Mullis, who shared state and municipal government records with The Current GA. To the environmentalist, HMGMA’s wastewater issues are part of a larger pattern of neglect of state standards and good stewardship of natural resources.
“There seems to be some sort of gap in the system where the contents of wastewater hauled to treatment facilities is not properly vetted,” Mullis said. “The result is industrial pollutants being passed-through treatment facilities, polluting our shared waters, and potentially ruining the facilities’ ability to effectively treat any wastewater it receives.”
Treatment plan cut short
The Savannah city government agreed to treat HMGMA’s industrial wastewater as a temporary measure as the Bryan County treatment facility was being built. On Sept. 3, the Travis Field Water Reclamation Facility near the airport received its first wastewater from the Hyundai site through 24 miles of pipe, said Shawn Rosenquist, a senior civil engineer with the city.
Within weeks, however, the city technicians discovered that Hyundai’s wastewater contained more than six times the allowable limit of copper and more than twice the allowable zinc concentration. As well, HMGMA failed to keep continuous oversight on its wastewater conductivity, with gaps in data that sometimes reached 19 hours.
Savannah, like other large municipalities and counties in Georgia, has authority from the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to operate and enforce an industrial pretreatment program, Savannah Chief of Water Resources Ron Feldner explained in an interview with The Current GA.
The city issues permits to industrial users to ensure that they pre-treat their industrial wastewater to standards that make it compatible with the city’s processes. Ultimately, the city must ensure the treated water it discharges into the Savannah River meets the requirements of its own permit under the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System.
The permit for HMGMA demanded self reporting from the company.
However, city technicians found “clear violations of government parameters,” Rosenquist said in an interview with The Current GA, that resulted in rising levels of phosphorus in the discharge from Travis Field, something he described as a red flag.
“We know that the biological treatment of phosphorus is one of the more sensitive plant processes, so that’s one that we monitor very closely in terms of an impediment to biological processes in plant,” he said.
Plant operators then looked for what could have thrown the phosphorus removal off-kilter. The data suggested it was elevated levels of zinc and copper, Rosenquist said.
On Sept. 26, the city shut down operations at Travis Field in anticipation of Hurricane Helene. That was also the last day it received wastewater from HMGMA, Rosenquist said.
On Oct. 1, the city sent a “Notice of Violation” to Hyundai detailing the permit violations and demanding a detailed correction plan.
“The fact that they could not achieve compliance with the permit to discharge to us simply necessitated them taking other alternate approaches to getting rid of the wastewater via some disposal mechanism that obviously wasn’t Travis Field,” Feldner said.
Trucking it out
Rather than restart wastewater treatment in Savannah, HMGMA started trucking wastewater to an array of different facilities in late September, according to correspondence between the Hyundai affiliate and Georgia’s EPD.
One of those sites was Richmond Hill Wastewater Treatment Plant. But state regulators at the EPD stepped in on Dec. 6, sending a “Letter of Concern” to HMGMA. The letter informed HMGMA that it needed a permit to send wastewater to this type of government-owned facility and requested a list of all receiving treatment plants.
In the last four months of 2024, HMGMA sent more than 5.2 million gallons of wastewater to private treatment plants operated by Liquid Environmental Solutions in Jacksonville, Fla.; ReWorld, which operates wastewater treatment facilities in Augusta and Asheboro, NC; Shamrock Environmental Corp, with treatment facilities in Browns Summit, NC and Oxford, Ga; and US Water Recovery in Goose Creek, SC.
Communications and PR Manager Joe LaMuraglia said that Hyundai also tried to figure out what was wrong with its pretreatment process at the megasite.
LaMuraglia said the company’s own investigation showed that pipes within its onsite pretreatment system had elevated levels of zinc that affected both domestic and industrial wastewater discharge. The piping is in the process of being replaced, but the process won’t be complete until the fourth quarter of 2025, he said.
Meanwhile, HMGMA received a Notice of Violation on Jan. 27 from the EPD for not applying or receiving a permit prior to disposing wastewater at the Richmond Hill facility.
The EPD notice threatens fines for any continued noncompliance.
Correspondence between HMGMA and EPD show that the companies from the Ellabell manufacturing site stopped using the Richmond Hill facility in November. LaMuraglia said the company had not received any fines as of March 5.
“We are aware that hauling to a wastewater treatment facility is only authorized by permit and we have worked with GA-EPD to ensure proper disposal methods are used,’ LaMuraglia wrote in an email to The Current GA.
He also clarified that the wastewater is not solely from HMGMA.
HMGMA, as the legal entity in charge of the site, is the permit holder and subject of both Savannah’s and EPD’s regulatory actions.
State EPD officials say they continue to talk with HMGMA to ensure that wastewater is managed properly until the new Bryan County facility is ready later this year, according to EPD spokeswoman Sara Lips.
For the full article, visit The Current GA website.
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