Corporate Misconduct Case Study: Avient vs. Westlake and the Toxic Legacy in Calvert City

For the people of Calvert City, Kentucky, the environmental scars of industry are a permanent feature of the landscape. At a local vinyl-manufacturing complex, decades of pollution have created a toxic mess so severe that in 1988, the EPA designated it a Superfund site and estimated that a full cleanup would take more than a century.

Today, while the slow work of decontamination continues, the corporations responsible for the bill are not focused on accelerating that timeline. Instead, they are locked in a bitter, years-long legal war with each other, spending vast sums on elite law firms to fight over who should pay less.

The court case is ultimately about minimizing liability on a corporate balance sheet.

The Corporate Playbook: A Legacy of Poison and Procrastination

The story begins in the 1950s, when Goodrich Corporation built the complex and, for decades, used unlined, earthen ponds to dispose of hazardous waste—a practice that guaranteed environmental contamination. The pollution became so bad that a network of wells and a “steam stripper” had to be installed just to capture and treat the contaminated groundwater before it spread further.

The playbook of deferring responsibility continued through corporate transactions.

• In the 1990s, Goodrich sold the contaminated site to Westlake Vinyls, Inc., promising in the sales agreements to cover future cleanup costs.
• In 2000, Goodrich’s immense environmental liabilities were passed to PolyOne Corporation (now Avient) through a corporate merger.

The pollution didn’t stop with the sale. In 2002, the site’s problems were dangerously compounded when a storage tank spilled two million pounds of ethylene dichloride, one of the main contaminants poisoning the area.

A Cascade of Consequences: Fighting Each Other, Failing a Community

The core of this story is not the pollution itself, but the cynical corporate battle that has raged for years in its wake. The real-world consequence of this infighting is a massive diversion of resources and attention away from the one thing that matters: cleaning up the toxic legacy in Calvert City.

Environmental Degradation as a Bargaining Chip

The contaminated groundwater and soil are an ongoing problem that requires constant management. But for Avient and Westlake, this environmental crisis has become the subject of a protracted financial dispute. Their 2007 settlement agreement, designed to allocate cleanup costs through arbitration, has become a weapon.

The Hypocrisy of Corporate Litigation

The current legal battle reveals the cynical nature of this fight. Avient, the company that inherited Goodrich’s liabilities, has twice demanded arbitration under their agreement to settle cost disputes—once in 2010 and again in 2017. But now that Westlake has initiated an arbitration in 2022, Avient has gone to federal court to argue that the entire arbitration process is invalid and has been all along.

This is a tactical maneuver through and through. The very tool Avient used when it was convenient is now being attacked because it’s being used against them. This kind of legal gamesmanship ensures that the focus remains on courtrooms and contracts, not on the health of the Kentucky environment and its people.

A System Designed for This: Liability as a Tradable Asset

This section is analysis.

The endless dispute between Avient and Westlake is a perfect illustration of how neoliberal capitalism treats environmental devastation. The century-long cleanup of a Superfund site is not framed as a moral debt to a community, but rather a abstract financial liability to be managed, minimized, and, if possible, passed on to someone else.

Goodrich “sold” its problem to Westlake and its liability to Avient. Now, those two entities are not behaving like responsible stewards but like opposing parties in a commercial transaction. The legal system, with its complex and time-consuming procedures, becomes a willing accomplice. It provides a venue for corporations to fight for years over contractual interpretations, all while the real-world problem—the poison in the ground—festers. This is not a failure of the system; it is the system working as intended, prioritizing financial maneuvering over ecological and social responsibility.

Dodging Accountability: A War of Attrition

The true method of dodging accountability here is not denial, but delay. Neither Avient nor Westlake denies that the site is contaminated. Instead, they engage in a legal war of attrition. By challenging the validity of their own settlement agreement, Avient is attempting to throw a wrench into the established process for allocating costs, likely hoping to secure a more favorable outcome or simply exhaust their opponent.

This strategy ensures that a significant portion of the money that should be earmarked for remediation is instead funneled into the pockets of corporate law firms. The ultimate goal is not to clean the site efficiently, but to pay as little as possible over the longest possible period. Accountability is lost in a maze of motions, appeals, and procedural fights.

Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change

Breaking this cycle of corporate delay requires systemic change that removes the incentive to litigate rather than remediate. True reform would mean:

• Enforcing “Polluter Pays” with No Escape: Regulators should be empowered to establish fully funded, non-negotiable cleanup trusts at the outset of a Superfund designation. The corporations responsible would be required to fund it immediately, leaving them to fight over reimbursement on their own time, separate from the cleanup itself.
• Banning the Transfer of Liability: Environmental liabilities should not be treated as tradable assets in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The entity that created the pollution should retain ultimate responsibility, preventing the shell games that allow accountability to be diluted over time.
• Holding Executives Accountable: Instead of just corporate fines, individual executives should face personal liability for cleanup delays and failures to comply with environmental law, creating a powerful incentive for swift and effective action.

Conclusion: A Story of a System, Not an Exception

The court document detailing the fight between Avient and Westlake is not really about the validity of an arbitration clause. It’s about the toxic reality of a system that allows corporations to treat a poisoned community as the backdrop for a financial dispute. While lawyers argue over contractual language, the people of Calvert City are left with a cleanup timeline that will outlast many of them.

This case is a clear and damning example of how, under late-stage capitalism, the urgent work of environmental justice is endlessly deferred by the trivial, self-serving battles of the corporations who caused the harm in the first place.

All factual claims in this article were derived from the public court document: Avient Corp. v. Westlake Vinyls, Inc., No. 24-5989, decided and filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on July 29, 2025.hority to address profound corporate negligence and protect a community from harm.

This consent agreement can be found on the EPA’s website: https://yosemite.epa.gov/oa/rhc/epaadmin.nsf/Filings/1827CB12F86ECF1E85258CBB0017024A/$File/AESASS~1.PDF