TABLE OF CONTENTS Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) has been at the centre of a continued environmental campaign against its use and it is unfortunate but timely that all the issues around modern society have been placed first at its door. No other industry has had to face (yet) the searching questions about the need for sustainable development. The PVC industry has had to gear itself up to respond to these campaigns and this is covered in this chapter.
Sustainable development is not only about being able to advance and improve the standard of living today, but ensuring that future generations can also have the same possibilities. Accordingly, the earth s resources and life support systems should not be overloaded or impaired in meeting these objectives. These should be balanced between satisfying environmental, economic, and social needs.
The Greenpeace organisation s attack on PVC is based on its anti-chlorine stance. This is the devil s element , in their terms, due to the use of high energy to generate chlorine and the creation of an extremely reactive form that is not widely found in nature and that results in products and wastes that are toxic to human health and the environment. PVC, being an organochlorine derived from vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), has become lumped together with products such as the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and the refrigerant and aerosol gases chlorofluorocarbons (CFC). Both of these products are now considered to be persistent organic pollutants (POP) due to their stability and resistance to natural breakdown processes...
