Univar Solutions pays $300K Fine After EPA Finds Decade of Safety Failures

For over a decade, a major chemical distributor in Houston, TX failed to comply with federal regulations designed to prevent a catastrophic accidental release of extremely hazardous substances, placing the community at risk while regulators were unaware.

An investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uncovered a pattern of systemic safety failures at a Univar Solutions USA LLC facility, culminating in a settlement that allows the corporation to pay a financial fine without ever admitting to the facts of its environmental negligence.

A Pattern of Negligence

An EPA inspection in August 2024 revealed that Univar Solutions, a wholesale distributor that repackages and stores industrial chemicals, had repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act at its Houston facility. The company’s safety protocols and documentation, legally required to protect the public from dangerous chemicals like hydrochloric acid and ammonium hydroxide, were neglected for years.

• Decade-Old Safety Plan: The company failed to review and update its legally mandated Risk Management Plan (RMP) for nearly 13 years, from September 2010 to May 2023. This core document outlines hazard assessments, prevention programs, and emergency response.
• Ignored Hazard Reviews: The company failed to update its hazard reviews for hydrochloric acid and cyclohexylamine for an entire five-year period between 2018 and 2023. For other hazardous chemicals, it failed to document the results of safety reviews or ensure that identified problems were ever fixed.
• Overdue Equipment Testing: Univar violated the “General Duty Clause” of the Clean Air Act by failing to maintain a safe facility. It allowed critical testing on storage totes containing hydrochloric acid to become overdue by 37 months, defying its own operating standards. It also failed to retest an ammonium hydroxide tote according to recognized engineering practices.
• Failed Compliance Audits: Following compliance audits in October 2020 and June 2023, the company failed to document its responses to the findings or prove that the identified safety deficiencies had been corrected.

A System Designed to Fail

The case against Univar Solutions is about the deliberate breakdown of the very systems designed to prevent one. The consequences are measured in the erosion of safety and public trust.

The Public Health Risk

The regulations Univar ignored are the very barrier between a functioning chemical facility and an accidental release of substances that the EPA acknowledges “may reasonably be anticipated to cause death, injury, or serious adverse effects to human health or the environment”.

By failing to update safety plans, review hazards, and maintain equipment, the company created a preventable, long-term risk for the surrounding Houston community.

The Erosion of Trust

This case exposes a system where corporate accountability is optional. For 13 years, a critical safety plan sat unreviewed. For years, audits were ignored and equipment went untested. The failure was not a single mistake but a sustained pattern of non-compliance. The subsequent settlement allows the company to pay a fine and move on, undermining public trust in both corporate self-policing and the power of regulators to enforce the law meaningfully.

Accountability by the Pound

The official response was a Consent Agreement and Final Order (CAFO), filed on September 25, 2025, in which Univar Solutions agreed to pay a civil penalty of $298,872.22.

This resolution, however, comes with an infuriating loophole: the company “neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations” detailed in the EPA’s findings. This is the anatomy of modern corporate accountability—a financial transaction that substitutes for an admission of wrongdoing. The company simply pays to make the problem disappear, certifying it is now in compliance without ever having to acknowledge the years it was not.

This case is a symptom of our current larger systemic failure where penalties are treated as a cost of doing business and settlements are engineered to shield corporations from liability.

True accountability must needs require an admission of the facts and a transparent, independently verified overhaul of the safety culture that allowed these failures to persist for more than a decade. Instead, the system settled for a check.

The consent agreement can be found on the EPA’s website: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/E180AF2CAEE87E3585258C850006E1D4/$File/Univar%20Solutions%20USA%20LLC%20(RCRA-09-2025-0041)%20-%20Filed%20CAFO.pdf