Anti-plastics ideologue and Orion Magazine contributor Rebecca Altman recently wrote an essay chock-full of misleading assertions about PVC. The biggest red flag: she never reached out to the Vinyl Institute for comment; her story exclusively sources long-time PVC opponents in an effort to validate her deceptive, one-sided portrayal of the material.
We’ve addressed common inaccuracies about PVC advanced by agenda-driven opponents on many previous occasions. But Altman makes one assertion that deserves special attention. A wide variety of products are made of PVC, she notes, everything from garden hoses to water pipes and vinyl records.
She clearly intends to alarm her readers with this observation, though she never answers the key follow-up question: why is PVC used to manufacture all these products? The answer is pretty simple. It’s a versatile material that helps save lives, protect the environment and improve the living standards of people around the world. Let’s consider a few examples.
Life-saving medicine
If you or one of your loved ones has ever stayed in a hospital, you have almost certainly benefited from the use of PVC. That’s because the versatile plastic is used to make bags that supply blood and intravenous medication, tubing that delivers oxygen and packaging that preserves the life-saving drugs so many patients depend on. It isn’t an accident that PVC is specified for all these applications. Hospitals use these materials because they’re durable, reliable and affordable—as independent experts have said for years.
Clean drinking water
A similar case can be made for water pipes. Many municipal governments rely on PVC to deliver clean drinking water to their residents because the material meets rigorous safety standards and has a service life of 100 years or longer. As the Washington Post notes, public health suffers when cities and towns rely on substandard water infrastructure. “Some utilities are losing as much as half or more of their water supply to leaks … threatening their residents’ wallets and their health.”
Safe food
PVC is also used to keep our food fresh, preventing bacterial contamination, extending shelf life and reducing waste. The material has been utilized to manufacture food wraps, can enamels, and some rigid food packaging materials for more than four decades.
Like its medical applications, PVC’s use in food storage is not an accident. Plastic packaging, PVC containers included, helps get food “safely from the point of manufacture to consumers’ cupboards and refrigerators,” says Luz Claudio, professor of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Critics want the public to think these products pose a risk, yet they are tightly regulated by the US FDA to ensure their safety.
The bottom line is this: PVC has hundreds of consumer and industrial applications that help make modern life possible. Altman and her ideological allies would prefer not to discuss these crucial details, but the public deserves to know them. Instead, Altman presents her readers with a series of agenda-driven statements about PVC, denying them a balanced presentation of the facts and the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.
Any reader in search of the truth should find that unacceptable.