by Jared Strong, Iowa Capital Dispatch
July 26, 2024
A large eastern Iowa facility that makes ketchup and other condiments failed for more than two years to monitor contaminants in the more than 1 million gallons of untreated wastewater it discharged into a creek each day, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
Kraft Heinz Foods Company recently agreed to pay an $8,000 fine for the violations at its Muscatine location. It uses municipal water to cool its equipment and discharges it along with stormwater into Mad Creek, which flows for less than a mile to the Mississippi River.
The DNR documented more than 20 violations of pollution limits for the wastewater from 2017 to 2020 and issued a violation notice to the company in November 2020. There was often too much chlorine in the water, and it otherwise had the potential to excessively limit the amount of oxygen in the creek water. The facility also had failed to test for contaminants as frequently as required.
The department is not aware of any obvious environmental effects from those violations, such as fish kills, said Caroline Harmening, an environmental specialist for the DNR who investigated the situation.
Despite the department’s notice to remedy the violations, less than two months later the facility apparently ceased all monitoring of the wastewater, DNR records show. The department discovered the lack of monitoring during a routine inspection in February 2024.
The company was able to provide some testing data starting from August 2023 but none prior to that going back to January 2021.
“Prior to August 2023, the data is inconclusive due to personnel changeover in the plant and technological difficulties with the controller on the flow meter,” Kraft Heinz said in a letter to the DNR in March 2024.
The company further said it “believes the measures it has taken in its stormwater system have adequately addressed the alleged violations.”
Harmening said she is not aware of any further wastewater violations at the facility since that letter. It’s unclear whether there were violations in the preceding years.
“Since we don’t have any data, we don’t know if they did or by how much they might have exceeded different limits,” Harmening said.
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