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Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Wednesday, November 27th. I'm Bell Lynn for the Wall Street Journal.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is considered a champion of the environment for his role in pioneering the electric car industry.

But a new WSJ investigation uncovers an account of environmental problems across his companies,

especially at Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin, Texas.

Some of the issues reported there include the treatment of wastewater and air pollution at the plant,

which is one of the biggest car factories in the world, roughly a mile long and more than 10 million square feet.

Our reporter, Susan Pulliam, tells us about Tesla's alleged environmental violations

and how the company and regulators have responded.

Susan, in spring of 2022, production of Tesla's new Model Y SUV was ramping up at its gigafactory in Austin.

Sources told the journal that some environmental engineers and others at Tesla were concerned about a roughly six-acre triangular-shaped evaporation pond that the company built to hold wastewater.

What happened there?

Yes, so there were a couple of issues having to do with wastewater in Austin.

One was what they called an evaporation pond where they were basically dumping water from construction in other areas of the plant. For instance, the

paint shop. Certain chemicals were being put in the pond and the issue with the pond was that they

didn't tell the city water authority that they were discharging the water from the pond into the

city's sewer system without having treated it. If they taken out the pollutants or accounted for

them, it would have been a different story. But they were sending it through to Austin Water untreated.

They self-reported this to the city. Separate from the evaporation pond, which was kind of like a

...