A one-person “group” with a clear anti-PVC pipe agenda that goes by the contrived name “Safe Piping Matters” (SPM) recently promoted a study by two Poland-based researchers and made some rather odd claims about PVC pipe that have never (to our knowledge) been replicated.
Why Paul Hagar, SPM’s executive director, would stake his personal reputation on statements that fail the basic scientific red-face test is beyond us. Truth be told, we would have ignored it altogether, except the scribes at Mechanical Hub decided to lower their journalistic standards by reflexively covering it without doing any homework whatsoever. So yet again, we find ourselves in the familiar place of having to do their job for them.
According to SPM, the crux of the study by researchers Joanna Świetlik and Marta Magnucka (a Ph.D. student) is that aging plastic pipes “release particles of plastic into water.” No other study we’ve seen, in over 50 years of rigorous scientific research, has ever shown this to occur. Ever. PVC pipe is a rigid material that doesn't “peel” the way SPM would like people to believe. Any discovery of microparticles found in municipal water supplies must take other sources into account – sources that may not have been considered in their work.
Reputable media outlets have a responsibility to challenge study conclusions drawn from agenda-driven organizations that contradict decades of rigorous science before spoon-feeding them to unwitting readers. Outlets should take the time to investigate whether claims withstand scientific scrutiny before giving them the credibility they sometimes don’t deserve. That regrettably didn’t happen over at Mechanical Hub, which took SPM’s bait and reported the Polish study and SPM’s conclusions without doing any real reporting at all.
We’ll be watching Safe Piping Matters, the outlets that cover them, and the flawed studies they promote, to advance the cause of a more accurate discourse on PVC pipe.