For the second time in 12 months, the multinational conglomerate and Minnesota-based 3M has been found to have mismanaged hazardous waste.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found that the company had mismanaged waste with its incinerator at its Cottage Grove facility since 1996.
The discovery has brought the most significant penalty the company has ever been assessed, a $2.8 million fine, the company’s second in the last year. The MPCA first began looking into the mismanagement in 2020, marking the end to a two-year long investigation.
Kirk Koudelka, the Assistant Commissioner at MPCA, said that, thankfully, there is no evidence the mismanagement resulted in a public health risk. Even still, he acknowledged that seeing another violation is unsettling for residents in the area.
“We understand that for those residents of the east metro, this isn’t reassuring that this is the second violation in 12 months,” Koudelka said. “But the good news is the incinerator is closed. The material is no longer there. They will not be accepting this material again. So these types of violations, they can not occur again.”
As for the specifics of the mismanagement, 3M was found to be inaccurately identifying hazardous waste, sending it to incinerators as non-hazardous. On top of that, the company also failed to track its waste and determine if it contained hazardous elements.
“This is one of the largest [penalties] in our memory of hazardous waste-related violations and some of our other violations. This a fairly significant penalty across the board,” Koudelka said.
The incinerator, which is also the only one in Minnesota, has since been permanently closed.
According to Koudelka, a third investigation is still pending on the 3M location, but he declined to specify what it is concerning.
“This is something that is concerning, and why we have taken the steps to move forward and did the investigation because we don’t want a pattern of this to move on,” Koudelka said.
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