United States v. Tribar Technologies, Inc.

On December 18, 2024, Tribar Technologies, Inc., (Tribar) pleaded guilty to a negligent violation of a pretreatment standard under the Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. §§ 1317(d) and 1319(c)(1)(A)).

Tribar manufactures automobile parts and presently operates five active plants in southeast Michigan. Plant 5 is a chrome plating facility, located in Wixom, Michigan. It uses an electroplating process to apply chrome finishing to plastic automotive parts. Plant 5 generates wastewater that contains chromium compounds, including hexavalent chromium. Hexavalent chromium is a known carcinogen.

On July 23, 2022, Plant 5 accumulated approximately 15,000 gallons of untreated wastewater containing high concentrations of hexavalent chromium. This wastewater had higher levels of pollutants than the wastewater typically generated from Plant 5 operations. During the week beginning July 25, 2022, employees at Plant 5 attempted to treat this wastewater in a holding tank to reduce the amount of hexavalent chromium before putting it into the Plant 5 wastewater treatment system. By the end of the week, the wastewater still contained high concentrations of hexavalent chromium.

On July 29, 2022, an employee discharged approximately 10,000 gallons of insufficiently treated wastewater from the holding tank into the Plant 5 wastewater treatment system. This discharge activated wastewater treatment system alarms, indicating that the wastewater required further treatment before it could be discharged to the Wixom sanitary sewer system. This employee disabled approximately 460 alarms and discharged the wastewater to the Wixom sanitary sewer system and ultimately to the Wixom POTW without completing the treatment necessary to remove chromium from the wastewater, as required by Tribar’ s Industrial Pretreatment Program Permit.

Tribar did not report the discharge of untreated wastewater to Wixom until approximately 12:23pm on August 1, 2022, but claimed in writing that it had reported the discharge by 8:30 am on that day.