The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [59]
And what about recycling? There’s that white flag again, eager to quell our concerns about using too much Stuff and making too much waste. With PVC, recycling simply isn’t a solution: it just adds to the problem, because recycling a poison perpetuates the hazard and exposes yet another round of workers and future consumers. The only answer is to stop making new PVC and get the existing PVC out of circulation.
So what to do with the PVC you do have? First off, don’t beat yourself up if it’s around you and your family: even in my household, despite my vigilance, insidious PVC infiltrates. Sometimes it arrives in the form of small toys in goodie bags my daughter brings home from birthday parties. Occasionally I get something, like the new extension cord I just bought, that I didn’t realize was PVC until I opened the package and its stench filled up the garage. Once I ordered a rain jacket for my daughter; again, although the online description didn’t say it was PVC, its odor did. So what to do? In all of these cases, I pack up the product and send it back to the manufacturer with a letter explaining why the product is unacceptable, giving them the rundown on PVC, and demanding a refund. (There’s a sample letter in appendix 3 you are welcome to copy). If I can’t identify the manufacturer, the offending product goes into a box in my garage that, when full, I mail off to the Vinyl Institute, an industry trade group in D.C. (Their address is also in appendix 3.) Since these guys make big bucks to defend the producers of PVC, I figure they can deal with it. You could also invite your neighbors to send theirs back with yours, and if you get enough people to participate, invite a local TV, radio, or newspaper reporter. The more we can raise awareness about how unacceptable PVC is, the better.
As for avoiding future PVC purchases, this material isn’t too hard to identify. The two easiest clues are the label and the smell. If you turn a plastic container over and find a number 3 inside the little chasing-arrows recycling logo, put it back on the shelf.
If you can, make a quick call to the customer service number on the container, or send an e-mail or letter when you get home, telling the company you’re not buying their Stuff as long as it’s packaged in the most toxic plastic on the planet. Some containers don’t display the number but say “vinyl” or “PVC” or may even have just a little “V.” Look carefully. It’s worth the extra minute to make sure you’re not bringing PVC home.
The other way to identify PVC—often from yards away—is the smell. You know that smell of a new shower curtain, a new car, or the shoe section at a Target store? That is PVC. Or more accurately, it’s some of the additive chemicals that are off-gassing. At a Halloween-time birthday party my daughter attended recently, plastic vampire fangs were handed out as favors. As soon as she got a whiff of them, she started running around the party grabbing them from the other kids, yelling, “Don’t put them in your mouth!” In other words, even your kids can be on guard against it. If you think this is a sad situation to put our kids in, you’re right. It stinks—both in terms of odor and in terms of whoever made the decision to use this supertoxic material when safer alternatives exist.
It’s more of a challenge to figure out how to get all the PVC pipes out of our houses, but we can easily eliminate the packaging, plastic bottles, and containers, as well as all the junky vinyl Stuff PVC is so often used for, like plasticky backpacks or inflatable kiddie pools. There are safe, cost-effective alternatives to so much PVC crap! In my bathroom, I have a cotton shower curtain that I can