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Feb 28th, 2007                                Print this article

USGBC punts on PVC

By Tony Deligio

A long-awaited ruling from United States Green Building Council (USGBC; Washington DC) on the fate of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in its LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) rating system in some ways created more questions than answers, but for now, it did spare PVC by rejecting a credit to builders that avoided the material.

Malcolm Lewis, chairman of USGBC’s Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee (TSAC), said in a Feb. 23 teleconference on the matter that the USGBC was working from a precautionary principle wherein, “If there is something we don’t know, but the consequences are bad, we want to err on the side of caution.” Formed in the spring of 2001, after a late 1999 decision to offer commercial interior builders a credit for avoiding PVC sparked industry protest, Lewis’s TSAC released a draft report in December 2004 that said PVC performed no worse than select alternative materials in select building products. After receiving extensive comments and data from the public and reviewing more than 2000 documents of relevance to the matter, the USGBC decided a yes or no answer to the question would oversimplify the question. “There is no single answer,” Lewis said, adding it depends on variables like the application, life-cycle assessment method applied, and how to weigh environmental versus human-health impacts. “Everyone was looking for the magic bullet—yes or no—but it’s just not there,” Lewis said in a teleconference. The Vinyl Institute (Arlington, VA), which lobbies on behalf of PVC, was supportive of the move, with President Tim Burns stating bluntly in a release, “This is the right decision.”

The study was limited to four primary applications, including: siding; drain, water, and vent piping; resilient flooring; and windows frames. For siding, the group compared PVC to aluminum, wood, and fiber cement. In flooring, sheet vinyl, vinyl composition, linoleum, and cork were considered. For pipe, PVC was weighed against ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene) and cast iron, while in window frames wood and aluminum were examined.

If you only considered the product from its inception through use, the panel found that PVC performed better than alternatives in three out of four products for environmental and human-health impact. However, if end of life, occupational exposure, and residential impact were included, PVC was the worst. In large part, this was on the basis of carcinogenic dioxins released when PVC is burned. The USGBC cited “backyard trash burning” and “landfill fires” as instances when such toxins could be released but admitted no reliable data were available on the prevalence of such fires, which in part, forestalled a definitive ruling.

In the Vinyl Institute release, Burns dismissed the threat of PVC burning. “The fact is that landfill fires are extremely rare in the United States, and the burning of waste at construction sites is outlawed in most jurisdictions, so this is largely a non-issue,” Burns said.

Allen Blakey, Vinyl Institute spokesman, also pointed out that in its recent review of CPVC pipe, the California Department of Housing and Community Development called landfill fires “relatively rare occurrences” and that “it is very rare that such fires release toxins” in levels that would do harm.

In the mean time, the USGBC is interested in more data from stakeholders, especially for PVC alternatives, with Lewis admitting, “This is a process that’s just beginning.” The USGBC will also work on how to weigh human versus environmental impacts for materials, and consider focusing their concern on pollutants in the future, versus classes of materials like PVC.—tdeligio@modplas.com

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