Elon musk at the tesla annual shareholder meeting today  14155033430
Tesla CEO Elon Musk | Wikipedia Commons/Steve Jurvetson

EPA reaches settlement with Tesla Motors over pollution control violations at California facility

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has settled with Tesla Motors after finding Clean Air Act violations in Tesla's Fremont, California, manufacturing facility.

In a release Feb. 22, the EPA states Tesla agreed to pay $275,000 to settle the matter, in accordance with the EPA’s National Compliance Initiative, which seeks to create cleaner air for communities by reducing excess emissions of harmful pollutants.

“Today’s enforcement action against Tesla reflects EPA’s continued commitment to ensuring compliance with federal clean air laws,” EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator Martha Guzman said in the release. “EPA takes seriously every company’s obligation to safeguard our environment and protect our most vulnerable communities.”

The focus of the complaint was that Tesla didn’t develop a work-practice plan to help lower air pollutants when it came to its vehicle coating materials, the release states.

According to a report by CNBC, Tesla has had at least four fires in the paint shop at its Fremont location since 2014. At that time, employees had expressed concerns for their health and well-being while the report states fires like these are not common in the auto manufacturing industry.

A week and a half after a fire halted production at the facility in April, CNBC reports that Tesla shut down its Fremont operations temporarily to make some improvements. The recent EPA settlement comes after the agency determined Tesla had likewise failed to correctly perform required monthly emissions calculations to demonstrate that the facility’s coating operations complied with federal hazardous air pollutant standards and failed to keep all records associated with the calculations.

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