Pollution at Samsung’s Hungarian factory was limited to enclosed space, government claims

There was no pollution outside the factory, and when pollution occurred inside the plant, it was penalized as strictly as possible, representatives of Fidesz and KDNP said on Monday in parliament in response to questions about the case of chemical exposure at Samsung's factory in Göd. According to them, representatives of the opposition parties are lying and misleading the public.

The first day of the spring session of the Hungarian Parliament was held on Monday, February 23. Viktor Orbán was the first to speak and was followed by responses from the leaders of all opposition parties. Several representatives of the opposition raised questions about the government's responsibility in the case of the pollution levels detected at Samsung's factory in Göd.

In our article published in early February, based in part on previously published articles by Átlátszó and in part on documents and reports we had obtained, we revealed in detail the serious occupational safety deficiencies that had occurred at Samsung's battery factory in Göd between 2021 and 2023. According to publicly available records and documents obtained by Telex, for years, factory workers were forced to inhale toxic, carcinogenic heavy metals in quantities exceeding the legal limits, sometimes up to several hundred times above the limit.

It is important to note that our article only discusses toxic emissions within the factory, not those outside of it. However, this is something that has been reported on before: in 2024, based on data from the National Environmental Information System, Átlátszó reported that Samsung had released 88 tons of toxic NMP solvent into the air over a period of several years.

Then, in early 2025, Telex reported that black dust had been emitted into the air from the Samsung factory's vents for years. According to several independent sources consulted by Telex, this dust coming out of the vents was a mixture of various substances, including toxic ones, but both Samsung and the government agency claim that only harmless graphite was released.

Would Orbán work at the factory in Göd?

Several opposition MPs questioned the Prime Minister on this issue during the opening part of the Parliament’s Tuesday sitting. Momentum representative Dávid Bedő asked the Prime Minister whether he would “work at the battery factory in Göd for a month, and whether he would drink the local tap water, and breathe the local air.”

Imre Komjáthi, a representative of MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party), recalled all the times he had questioned the government about Samsung's Göd facility and noted that Fidesz representatives had always voted down his legislative proposals, which he believed could have solved the problems. He then asked whether it was true that South Korean factories operating in Hungary were subject to Korean regulations.

Bence Tordai, leader of the Párbeszéd (Dialogue) faction, also asked about this, mentioning that he had previously tried to obtain the minutes of an inspection carried out by the government authority last year, but had been refused. László György Lukács then warned that Debrecen (where a battery factory is currently under construction) would face the same fate as Göd.

Orbán says the opposition is lying in order to mislead people

Prime Minister Orbán was the first to respond to these statements, but he made no mention whatsoever of the health and safety deficiencies or the documented cases of poisoning within the factory. He did say, however, that it is not true that Korean factories operating in the country are subject to Korean regulations, and that Hungarian regulations are the strictest possible.

The Prime Minister also said that the local government in Göd conducts quarterly measurements and "not once have they measured pollution from the factory that exceeded the limit," and added that this data was made public on a regular basis. "You come here and lie, so as to mislead people. I don't think that's the right way to go about things," Orbán said of the opposition.

Csaba Latorcai, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Ministry of Public Administration and Regional Development was next to speak after Orbán. He responded to these questions in more detail on behalf of the government. According to him, in its capacity as both an environmental protection and occupational safety authority, the Pest County Government Office has enforced the strictest possible measures against all companies, including Samsung.

Latorcai claimed that this is evidenced by the fact that the government office has so far imposed fines of more than HUF 400 million on Samsung, of which HUF 31 million were environmental fines and HUF 146 million were occupational health and safety fines. He also said that last spring, they examined the black dust that had accumulated on the roof of the factory and determined that it was clearly graphite. He said that since then, a new safety system has been installed on the factory's filtration system, which has actually eliminated the emission of graphite.

According to Latorcai, "the government office has not detected any pollution that would have had any impact outside the factory. Anything of this nature only occurred within the factory, in a closed space, and was sanctioned with the strictest penalties." Latorcai said that fines of this kind were also imposed in March 2025. Previously, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás also said that the pollution had only occurred inside the factory.

No mentions of poisonings that exceeded the maximum permissible level by hundreds of times

Thus, two weeks after our article on Samsung's toxic emissions, the government's narrative became that although some contamination had occurred inside the factory, there was no contamination outside of it. The latter is based on measurements taken by the city of Göd, which show that since 2023, no toxic substances originating from the battery factory have been detected in the air around the factory.

Government officials did not comment at all on the fact that the heavily embryotoxic NMP, used in battery production, was found in the groundwater in Göd in 2022 and then in the fields in the settlement too, in 2024. They also made no mention of the 88 tons of NMP released into the air by the factory.