Cancer Alley: Westlake profile

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Westlake Chemical is a petrochemical company that makes plastic products such as polyvinyl choride (PVC) and building materials. It was founded in 1986 by Ting Tsung Chao in 1986 in Houston, Texas. Westlake first purchased a polyethylene plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana, followed by petrochemical plants in Calvert City, Kentucky, in 1990. Investigative journalists have documented many instances of releases of toxic carcinogens from all of these plants - for example Westlake emitted 48,000 times more ethylene dichloride than all other companies in Calvert City put together and over 28 times more vinyl chloride emissions than all of the others.

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In 2021, five workers were injured in an explosion at Westlake’s plant in Sulphur, Louisiana, and another six workers were injured in an explosion at a company plant in Westlake, Louisiana in January 2022. In June 2022, Westlake agreed to pay a $1 million civil penalty and invest $110 million in safety upgrades at the two Louisiana plants as well as the Calvert City plant. Westlake was also fined $350,000 in November 2020 for mercury pollution of the Ohio river in West Virginia.

(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Westlake's plant in Geismar. Note that auto-display of data from this link may be disabled for some browsers. If so, copy the URL manually into a new browser window to see it.)

Westlake founder Chao also founded Taiwan Polypropylene Company and China General Plastics Group in Taiwan, Titan Chemicals in Malaysia and Suzhou Huasu Plastics Company in China. All of the Chao companies were involved in petrochemical production such as Titan which built a major petrochemical complex in Pasir Gudang, Johor state, Malaysia. The Titan Chemicals complex, which was sold off to the Honam group in South Korea, has been linked to water pollution of local rivers in Malaysia as well as air pollution that drifted across the border to Singapore.

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To learn more about Westlake, see the CorpWatch Gulliver profile here. A complete list of CorpWatch's Cancer Alley profiles may be accessed here.