What’s Your Thing?
Last week I was contacted by a journalist who wanted me to help her talk about a toxic event. I think we have a new term in our environment today, unfortunately, and I’m coining it a “Toxic Event”. Are we all horrified about what’s happening in Palestine, Ohio? What happened in Palestine isn’t about a train derailment. It’s not about railroad safety. It’s not even about the company who was making a substance so volatile that it would create such destruction. Do we know what was in those rail cars? It was Polyvinyl Chloride. That’s right…PVC.
The PVC industry will tell you it requires less energy to make PVC and it’s easy to separate and recycle. But what they don’t tell you is that chronic exposure can cause permanent liver injury and liver cancer, neurological or behavioral symptoms and changes to the skin and bones of the hand. What? Changes in the bones of your hand? Great, right? When it burns, as it did in Palestine, it creates a highly toxic gas called Hydrogen Chloride, all this according to the NCI.
And the building industry uses so much PVC. And manufacturers will tell you that demand is only growing as PVC currently represents 41% of the global plastics market. Wow. It’s toxic, but I guess that’s okay.
There are substitutes available, but the industry will tell you that they are not as efficient and are less cost-effective as compared to PVC. And there we go. It’s too much money. It just costs too much to do the right thing. And so we are all complicit. Because when faced with a decision, we want to save money for ourselves, for the client, for our company. As long as Walmart or Target or a (just insert your favorite retailer here) still wants to serve up savings in the form of plastic things, we will never walk away from this problem. And we watch the TV and listen to people who lived along the rail line talk about the destruction of fish and animals and people getting sick. And, you may not know, but at this same point in time, there are residents in LaSalle, Illinois who are suffering from a chemical explosion in a storage facility. And do we think, way in the back of our minds, that we would never own a home along a railroad line, or near an oil refinery or plastics plant? These are fence line communities, and these are the people who suffer from the effects of our support of the fossil fuel industry. Plastics represent 8% to 10% of the total oil supply. So as we all look ahead at electric vehicles, the oil industry is looking ahead at plastic production. Plastic production will keep their production high. This is a reminder that sustainability is also a social equity crisis.
We need regulation to protect us. This is what the government is supposed to do. Unfortunately, the chemical companies and their fossil fuel counterparts are well entrenched and have our politicians well in hand, focusing instead, on the jobs these industries create and the money they make their states. Please don’t expect the EPA to stop this. They are ill prepared, conveniently. The Toxic Substance Control Act Amendment of 2016 still places the burden of proof on the EPA to prove that a chemical is deadly. This is unlike the FDA, who places the burden on manufacturers to prove that their product is completely safe for consumption. Shockingly, this regulation has still not enabled the EPA to ban Asbestos. That’s right, it’s still legal to use because there are companies out there insisting that it’s necessary. And if you work at that factory, and have to suite up in a full hazmat suit, are you comfortable with that? What if your spouse had to wear a full hazmat suit to work everyday? Are you thinking the EPA can still protect us? Think about this, In the 40 years between the enactment of the original Toxic Substances Control Act and its 2016 amendments, the EPA has regulated fewer than 10 of over 86,000 existing chemicals registered for use in commerce. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization identify two million lives and fifty-three million disability-adjusted-life-years were lost worldwide in 2019 due to chemical exposures. But as long as we buy what they’re making, companies will continue to use these chemicals. So I remind you, it’s not the railroad who created this mess. If you’re looking for a villain in all of this, we need not look far. As an industry, I would love to see us all agree to stop using PVC. It sounds like such a simple thing.
As long as we have a climate crisis, we’ll have a humanitarian crisis. We can’t fix all of this overnight, but we all need to find a starting point. We need to change the way we live our lives, and change is never easy. Can we stop using PVC? Can we change our lifestyle? Travel less? Buy less plastic? There’s so much, but we can pick one thing, and get really good at it. What’s your thing?
