Corporate Misconduct Case Study: Univar Solutions & Its Impact on Public Safety
TLDR: According to a legal agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, chemical distribution giant Univar Solutions USA, LLC, was accused of illegally storing multiple containers of hazardous waste—including materials that are ignitable, corrosive, and toxic—for over 10 months at its facility in Fresno, California. The company operated without a permit for this storage and ultimately agreed to pay a civil penalty of $110,801 while neither admitting nor denying the specific allegations.
Read on for a deeper investigation into the specific violations and what they reveal about the systemic failures that prioritize corporate convenience over community and environmental health.
Introduction: A Ticking Clock in Fresno
In a sleepy industrial corner of Fresno, California, containers of hazardous chemical waste were allegedly left to sit for months, far beyond the legal time limit.
This wasn’t an accident but rather a documented outcome of corporate practice at Univar Solutions USA, LLC, a major player in the chemical distribution industry. Legal filings from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lay out an alarming accusation: the company operated an unpermitted hazardous waste storage facility, allowing dangerous materials to accumulate in a breach of foundational environmental law.
The case of Univar is more than a simple regulatory infraction. It is a window into the logic of modern neoliberal capitalism, where environmental safeguards are often treated not as moral imperatives, but as bureaucratic hurdles to be managed or ignored in the relentless pursuit of profit.
This story ultimately isn’t just about one company in Fresno; it’s about our very economic system that creates incentives for such behavior, exposing the deep cracks in corporate accountability and the tangible risks borne by communities and workers.
Inside the Allegations: A Pattern of Environmental Neglect
The government’s case against Univar Solutions began with a compliance inspection on December 14, 2022. What EPA officials found at the company’s Fresno facility painted a picture of systemic failure. The core of the violation was straightforward: generators of hazardous waste can accumulate it on-site for up to 90 days without a permit, but only if they follow a strict set of rules.
According to the EPA, Univar shattered this grace period. The agency determined that from early February to mid-December 2022—a period stretching over 300 days—the company illegally stored seven containers of hazardous waste.
These included ignitable, corrosive, reactive, and toxic wastes, such as discarded paint cans containing hazardous chemicals. At no point during this period did Univar hold the required permit to store such materials for that length of time, nor had it been granted an extension. The company was allegedly operating outside the law, plain and simple.
Timeline of an Alleged Violation
| Date | Event |
| February 6, 2022 | The alleged period of illegal hazardous waste storage by Univar Solutions begins. |
| December 14, 2022 | An EPA compliance inspection at the Fresno facility uncovers the storage violations. |
| March 4, 2025 | A Univar Vice President signs the consent agreement, agreeing to pay the penalty. |
| May 7, 2025 | The consent agreement is finalized and filed, making the penalties and terms effective. |
Regulatory Capture & Loopholes: When Exemptions Become Entitlements
The law that Univar allegedly violated is not a minor technicality; it is a cornerstone of hazardous waste management designed to prevent environmental disasters. The 90-day exemption is a privilege granted to companies to give them operational flexibility. It is not a right. In exchange for this flexibility, companies must meticulously follow all conditions, including the strict time limit.
When a corporation like Univar exceeds that 90-day limit, it isn’t just bending a rule; it is unilaterally revoking its end of the bargain with the public and regulators.
This behavior exemplifies a common tactic in a deregulated, neoliberal environment: treating conditional exemptions as permanent loopholes. The system is predicated on good-faith compliance, but the logic of late-stage capitalism often rewards those who push boundaries and treat regulations as suggestions rather than mandates. The rules are seen as costs to be minimized, not duties to be fulfilled.
Profit-Maximization at All Costs: The High Price of Cutting Corners
The legal documents do not state why Univar allowed hazardous waste to pile up for over ten months. But within a capitalist framework that relentlessly prioritizes profit maximization, the answer is often found on a balance sheet. Managing and disposing of toxic materials is a complex and expensive process, requiring logistical planning, specialized labor, and significant fees.
By delaying this process, a company can defer costs and streamline operations in the short term. Every day that waste sits on-site is another day an expense is pushed into the future. This calculation, which places immediate financial convenience above long-term environmental responsibility, is a hallmark of corporate decision-making under neoliberalism.
The risk of a potential fine is weighed against the certain cost of immediate compliance, and too often, the gamble appears worth taking.
The Economic Fallout: A Fine or Just the Cost of Doing Business?
For its environmental violations, Univar Solutions agreed to pay a civil penalty of $110,801. To an average American, this is a substantial sum of money. To a global chemical distributor, it is arguably the cost of doing business—a rounding error in a vast corporate budget, easily absorbed and forgotten.
This is a critical failure of the corporate accountability system.
When penalties for environmental violations are not significant enough to meaningfully impact a company’s bottom line, they cease to be a deterrent. Instead, they become a predictable operating expense, like a fee or a tax. The system inadvertently creates a reality where it can be more profitable to pollute and pay the fine than to invest in robust, preventative compliance systems from the outset.
Environmental & Public Health Risks: The Dangers Left to Linger
The materials Univar was accused of illegally storing pose direct and significant threats to human health and the environment. The hazardous waste codes listed in the legal filing—D001, D002, D005, and D035—represent distinct dangers:
- Ignitable Waste (D001): These materials can easily catch fire, creating the risk of a blaze that could release toxic smoke and potentially spread to other hazardous substances.
- Corrosive Waste (D002): Corrosive materials can eat through their containers, leading to leaks that poison the ground, contaminate water, and can cause severe chemical burns to anyone who comes into contact with them.
- Toxic Waste (D005, D035): These wastes are harmful or fatal if ingested or absorbed, and they can leach into the soil and groundwater, causing long-term contamination that threatens the entire ecosystem and the health of the surrounding community.
By storing these materials improperly for hundreds of days, the company prolonged the period of risk. Every additional day was another chance for a container to fail, a fire to start, or an accident to occur, with the Fresno community and the facility’s own workers on the front lines of that danger.
Exploitation of Workers: The Unseen Costs of Corporate Negligence
While the legal agreement focuses on environmental regulations, the human impact of these corporate failures starts with the workers at the Fresno facility. They are the individuals who handled these containers, worked near the storage area, and were most directly exposed to the risks of fire, leaks, and toxic exposure every day for over ten months.
This represents a form of systemic exploitation. In a profit-driven system, the health and safety of labor are often treated as secondary to operational efficiency and cost-cutting.
The decision to delay waste was an implicit decision to subject employees to a prolonged, unsafe work environment. The true cost of such choices is often paid not by executives, but by the workers whose health is silently put on the line.
Community Impact: Local Lives Undermined by Latent Threats
Univar’s facility at 4465 East Florence Avenue is not in a vacuum. It is part of the fabric of Fresno, California. The illegal storage of hazardous materials transformed the site into a latent threat to the surrounding neighborhoods, schools, and businesses. A potential chemical fire or a toxic leak would not have respected the facility’s property lines.
This dynamic is a recurring theme in late-stage capitalism, where industrial activities that generate private profit create public risks that are borne by the community. The residents of Fresno were not party to Univar’s operational decisions, yet they were exposed to the potential consequences. Their health, their property values, and their environment were all placed at risk by the failure of a corporation to follow basic safety laws.
The PR Machine: How to Settle a Violation Without Admitting Guilt
One of the most telling details in the legal document is the language of the settlement itself. Univar Solutions consented to the penalty while neither admitting nor denying the specific factual allegations made by the EPA. This is a classic and carefully calibrated legal maneuver used throughout the corporate world.
This strategy serves a critical public relations and legal function. It allows the company to make the problem go away by paying a fine, while simultaneously avoiding a formal admission of wrongdoing. An admission of guilt could be used against the company in future civil lawsuits by citizens or employees and would create a permanent, undeniable stain on its corporate reputation. By settling in this manner, the corporation contains the damage, framing the issue as a disagreement resolved, rather than a failing for which it is truly culpable.
Wealth Disparity & Corporate Greed: A Penalty That Fails to Punish
The $110,801 penalty stands in steep contrast to the scale of the corporation that incurred it. This fine is not designed to punish in a way that forces a fundamental change in corporate culture. Rather, it functions as a transactional resolution. It is a powerful illustration of how the justice system, particularly in the civil and administrative arenas, treats corporate and individual transgressions differently.
This disparity fuels public cynicism and reinforces the idea that there are two sets of rules: one for ordinary people and another for powerful corporations. In a system where wealth inequality is rampant, such penalties do little to bridge the gap or hold corporate entities to a standard that reflects the immense resources they command and the profound impact they have on society. It is a feature, not a bug, of a system that protects accumulated capital.
Global Parallels: A Pattern of Predation
The situation at the Fresno facility is not an anomaly. It is a local manifestation of a global pattern of corporate behavior. Across countless industries and countries, the story repeats itself: the pressures of a capitalist economy incentivize the externalizing of costs—pushing the environmental and social price of doing business onto the public.
From unregulated factories in the Global South to industrial sites in the American heartland, the drive for profit often leads to the neglect of safety and environmental protocols. Corporations find it is cheaper to lobby for deregulation, fight regulators in court, or pay the occasional fine than it is to build intrinsically safe and sustainable operations.
This Univar case is a textbook example of this logic at work, a reminder that such events are not isolated failures but predictable outcomes of the system itself.
Corporate Accountability Fails the Public
The resolution of the case against Univar Solutions is, in itself, a testament to a system of corporate accountability that often fails the public. The company agreed to a Consent Agreement and Final Order, a legal mechanism that simultaneously commences and concludes the penalty proceeding without any adjudication of the facts. While Univar consented to pay the $110,801 penalty, it did so while explicitly neither admitting nor denying the EPA’s factual allegations.
This outcome allows the corporation to put the matter to rest without ever being formally found guilty or being forced to acknowledge its corporate misconduct publicly. Such settlements are common in the landscape of corporate regulation, providing a path of least resistance that prioritizes resolution over transparent accountability. The public is left with the knowledge that a violation was alleged and a fine was paid, but the official record remains sanitized of any admission of corporate wrongdoing.
Pathways for Reform & Consumer Advocacy
The legal document itself does not propose reforms, but the case implicitly highlights the need for a more robust framework of corporate oversight.
The agreement does contain a provision for “stipulated penalties” for any future failure to comply with the order, ranging from $500 to $5,000 per day for each day of delay. This demonstrates that regulators have tools to compel future compliance, but it remains a reactive measure applied only after a violation has already been identified and settled.
True reform would require moving beyond reactive penalties. It would necessitate strengthening the initial regulations, increasing the statutory limits for fines so they represent a genuine deterrent rather than a business expense, and closing legal pathways that allow companies to resolve violations without admitting fault.
Without systemic changes that alter the risk-reward calculation for corporations, the pattern of behavior seen in this case is likely to continue unabated across industries.
Legal Minimalism: Doing Just Enough to Stay Plausibly Legal
The violations alleged in this case are a textbook example of legal minimalism—the corporate practice of adhering only to the bare minimum requirements of the law, if at all. The 90-day accumulation period is not a right; it is a conditional exemption from the much stricter requirements of obtaining a full hazardous waste storage permit. The EPA alleged that Univar failed to meet these fundamental conditions, thereby nullifying its exemption and placing it in violation of the law.
The company also allegedly failed to meet the conditions for a different, more limited exemption related to “satellite accumulation areas”.
The EPA alleged that Univar stored waste in excess of the 55-gallon volume limit for this exemption and failed to comply with labeling requirements for at least one container. This pattern suggests a culture where compliance is not a guiding principle but an obstacle to be navigated as cheaply as possible, a hallmark of corporate behavior under late-stage capitalism where the form of the law is often prioritized over its intent.
How Capitalism Exploits Delay: The Strategic Use of Time
The timeline of the Univar case reveals how corporations can benefit from systemic delays in enforcement. The alleged violations of storing hazardous waste took place over a ten-month period in 2022. The inspection that uncovered these issues occurred in December 2022, but the Final Order resolving the matter was not filed until May 7, 2025.
This multi-year gap between the alleged offense and its final resolution is strategically advantageous for a corporation.
It pushes the financial consequences of non-compliance far into the future, allowing the company to operate without disruption in the interim. For the community and workers, however, this delay means that the period of risk was real and immediate, while the accountability for creating that risk was postponed for years. In a capitalist system, time is money, and delaying accountability is a form of profit protection.
The Language of Legitimacy: How Courts Frame Harm
The legal document is written in a language that inherently neutralizes the severity of the alleged offense. The situation is described as a “civil administrative enforcement action” under the “Consolidated Rules of Practice”. The resolution is a “Consent Agreement and Final Order Pursuant to 40 C.F.R. Sections 22.13 and 22.18” 🥱
This technocratic and bureaucratic language transforms a tangible public health risk—the illegal, prolonged storage of ignitable, corrosive, and toxic chemicals—into an abstract legal proceeding. It frames the issue as a disagreement between two parties, the EPA and the “Respondent”, which can be resolved through a negotiated settlement. This sanitizing effect is crucial for maintaining legitimacy, as it obscures the visceral reality of the potential harm and recasts it as a manageable, administrative affair.
Profiting from Complexity: When Obscurity Shields Misconduct
Modern corporate structures are, by their nature, designed to diffuse responsibility. The legal action is against “Univar Solutions USA, LLC”, a limited liability company. The binding agreement explicitly extends to the respondent’s “officers, directors, partners, agents, employees, contractors, successors and assigns”.
While this case does not delve into a web of shell companies, it operates within a corporate system where complexity is a feature, not a bug. This structure shields individuals and the parent corporation from direct liability, ensuring that penalties are borne by the corporate entity itself—an entity for which a $110,801 fine is a manageable expense. This diffusion of responsibility is a cornerstone of late-stage capitalism, ensuring that even when misconduct is identified, it is difficult to pin accountability on specific individuals in the boardroom.
This Is the System Working as Intended
Ultimately, the Univar Solutions case should not be viewed as a failure of the system, but as a demonstration of the system working exactly as it was designed. In a neoliberal economy that structurally prioritizes capital accumulation and shareholder value, environmental regulations are often treated as externalities to be managed.
The outcome here is predictable: a corporation is accused of cutting corners on safety, a regulator intervenes, and the issue is resolved with a monetary payment that represents a fraction of corporate revenue and requires no admission of guilt.
This is the cycle of modern corporate regulation. It is a performance of accountability that creates the appearance of oversight while ensuring that the fundamental operations of capital are not seriously challenged. The fines are not large enough to deter future behavior, and the settlements are structured to minimize reputational damage, ensuring the evil corporation can continue its business with little more than a minor financial inconvenience.
Conclusion
The legal case of Univar Solutions USA, LLC, is a striking reminder of the human and societal cost of prioritizing profit over public safety. According to the EPA, a major corporation illegally stored hazardous waste for months, posing a direct threat to its workers and the Fresno community. The resolution—a modest six-figure penalty with no admission of wrongdoing—highlights the profound inadequacy of our current system of corporate accountability.
This is more than one company’s alleged failure. It is an indictment of a political and economic ideology that treats environmental protection as a burden and corporate penalties as a simple cost of doing business.
Until the system is reformed to impose consequences that are too significant to ignore, communities will continue to bear the risks created by corporate negligence, waiting for the next inspection, the next violation, and the next inadequate settlement.
Frivolous or Serious Lawsuit?
This legal action was unequivocally a serious matter. It was initiated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the federal body charged with enforcing the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (“RCRA”), a primary federal law governing hazardous waste disposal.
The action was based on findings from a formal compliance evaluation inspection conducted by the agency.
The EPA gathered specific evidence, alleging that seven distinct hazardous waste containers were stored for a period far exceeding the 90-day legal limit. The gravity of the matter is further underscored by the fact that the Respondent, Univar Solutions USA, LLC, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $110,801 to resolve the allegations.
A lawsuit brought by a federal agency, based on a physical inspection and resulting in a six-figure penalty, represents a significant and legitimate legal grievance rooted in the enforcement of federal environmental law.
Please visit this link on the EPA’s website to read the Consent Agreement between the EPA and Univar Solutions LLC: https://yosemite.epa.gov/oa/rhc/epaadmin.nsf/Filings/E180AF2CAEE87E3585258C850006E1D4/$File/Univar%20Solutions%20USA%20LLC%20(RCRA-09-2025-0041)%20-%20Filed%20CAFO.pdf
đź’ˇ Explore Corporate Misconduct by Category
Corporations harm people every day — from wage theft to pollution. Learn more by exploring key areas of injustice.
- 💀 Product Safety Violations — When companies risk lives for profit.
- 🌿 Environmental Violations — Pollution, ecological collapse, and unchecked greed.
- 💼 Labor Exploitation — Wage theft, worker abuse, and unsafe conditions.
- 🛡️ Data Breaches & Privacy Abuses — Misuse and mishandling of personal information.
- 💵 Financial Fraud & Corruption — Lies, scams, and executive impunity.
NOTE:
This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:
- The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
- Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
- The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
- My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.
All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.
Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)
Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....
