Destroyed recycling center settles with SK Battery for $31M, then blasts the company

COMMERCE, Ga. - SK Battery, a North Georgia EV battery maker, has paid $31 million to a nearby recycling business that went up in flames last year, allegedly because the factory illegally dumped its hazardous scrap batteries there.

The settlement hasn’t left all parties happy.

While the South Korean-owned company admitted no liability, the settlement of a civil lawsuit filed by Metro Site, Inc., had no confidentiality clause. So now the man who owned the Banks County recycling center tells the FOX 5 I-Team, he wants to warn his community about the massive lithium-ion battery factory off I-85 northeast of Atlanta.

"I wanted it to go to trial," Metro Site owner Scott Ledford told the I-Team. "I think (the community) needs to understand to watch what they're doing when they do business with this company."

Court records show SK Battery America accepted a settlement offer from Metro Site last month. Then Ledford’s legal team made the $31 million sum public last week in a press release that publicly accused the company of destroying evidence in the case.

"During the litigation," the press release said, "SK Battery destroyed critical evidence that it had been on notice to preserve."

Missing videos?

The state and local governments wooed SK Battery to Commerce at the end of the last decade with $300 million in tax abatements, grants and land. Its $2.6 billion factory employs more than 3,000 workers and has made batteries for the Ford F-150 Lightning and the Volkswagen ID.4.

Four years ago, SK Battery faced allegations of deleting emails in a trade secrets dispute with a rival battery maker, leading the U.S. International Trade Commission to rule in the other company’s favor, with SK settling for $1.8 billion.

The company denied destroying evidence in that case in a statement to FOX 5.

In the Metro Site case, court records show Ledford’s attorneys asked for sanctions, with SK Battery pushing back saying everything requested was provided. The judge never made a ruling on the allegations.

"SK Battery destroyed videos on the inside of the plant, on the outside of the plant," one of Ledford’s lawyers, Allyn Stockton, told the I-Team.

An affidavit filed in the case, signed by a former safety manager at the plant, elaborates on those accusations. The manager described surveillance cameras that should have captured scrap batteries being moved from within the plant to the outside, as well as logbooks he left behind when his employment ended.

Stockton said those videos might have shown the batteries going into the roll-off dumpster bound for Metro Site, but neither they nor the logbooks came back in discovery. The former safety manager, Mike Ramirez, confirmed signing the affidavit for the FOX 5 I-Team.

Ledford’s attorneys described other troubling things learned during the case about the company’s scrap batteries, as well as more fires.

One record filed in the case shows 62 internal fires at SK. The factory even has its own internal firefighting team with their own fire truck, the company confirmed.

The Ramirez affidavit alleges fires started because the plant ramped up production to unsafe levels, creating high volumes of unusable batteries – called NGs, or "no good" – that often combusted.

"Fires were occurring inside the plant routinely," the affidavit said, "and we were storing hundreds upon hundreds of NG pallets in four warehouses in Jefferson, Georgia (a fire occurred there in Jefferson and was caused by NG cells)."

Ledford and his attorneys said that was partly why, as a condition settling the lawsuit, there would be no confidentiality clause.

"The community needs to know that this is a culture. This is the culture of that corporation," Stockton, the attorney, said.

Some of the attorneys who represented Ledford are involved in a separate ongoing lawsuit over the fire, representing the Banks County government, which accused SK Battery of illegally endangering government property and employees, including the fire station next door.

‘Stringent procedures’

The I-Team asked SK’s legal team and company officials to talk on camera about the Metro Site case too, but they declined. The company said by email through a spokesman, "We settled because we thought both parties were ready to move on." It added, "We are not sure why Metro Site and its attorneys continue to argue the case …"

On the 62 fires, SK said they occurred over three years, "with many of the events triggered only by a smoke alarm without any fire," and none resulting in "significant damage or burn injuries to employees."

The written statement also described "stringent procedures" for disposing of production material.

"SK Battery America values its partnership with the Georgia community and is committed to having a positive impact on the area," the statement said. "More than a year ago, we added an extra layer of oversight to further strengthen these procedures before any waste material leaves our site. We believe it is in the best interest of both parties to move past this dispute."

The Georgia Environmental Protection Division has fined the company $33,000 over the fire.

The agreement ending the recycling center’s lawsuit "provides a generous settlement for Metro Site to rebuild and relaunch its business," the company said.

Sounding an alarm

But Scott Ledford has every reason to be upset with SK Battery. He built his business from the ground up, only to watch it burn to the ground in July 2023.

Ledford said the company had sent him lithium-ion batteries about a half dozen times before, mixed in with recycling materials. Fires had broken out, but nothing severe.

"They acknowledged the fact that we were not licensed nor permitted to handle lithium-ion battery packs or any type of hazardous waste," Ledford said. "Every time I’d meet with them, they'd make a bunch of promises that they had their problem fixed on their end. And I believed them."

Then, Ledford says, he got burned again.

"Basically, a pallet full of them had been put in a dumpster illegally, shipped over here," he said. "When you put (hundreds) of them together and there's a chain reaction, it was huge. And it was lighting everything in remote vicinity to it on fire."

The fire took four days and three million gallons of water to put out. Found among the embers, Leford alleged: more than 600 charred batteries made by SK.

He filed his lawsuit a few weeks later.

Ledford said despite how it looks, the settlement did not make him a rich man.

"That number would, on a piece of paper, make you smile," he said. "But when you do the rest of the math – for the debt that was associated with this facility, the rebuild cost of the facility, some of the equipment that I had in here  … That's just sucked every bit of the money off of it to where at the end of the day, I’ll about break even."

One of Ledford’s attorneys is Bo Hatchett, who’s also a Republican state senator from Cornelia.

Asked if the tax incentives for SK Battery in retrospect were a mistake, Hatchett said the company "brought a lot of jobs to the area."

"I believe that since this fire occurred, they have made some significant changes with their safety," he said. "But all in all, this was a small business, run by a local family, that burned to the ground."