A place for PVC in a sustainable world?

When it comes to greening the bad girl of plastics, consensus is key

It’s cheap, durable and so versatile you’ll find it in your clothes, your garden hose, your raincoats and your Barbie dolls. It wraps electric cables and it roofs your garden shed. No wonder global demand for polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, is over 35 million tonnes a year.

But it’s also the bad girl of the Barbie world. Its long life has traditionally depended on heavy metal stabilisers, such as lead, that do not degrade in the environment and so become global pollutants. And it owes its flexibility to phthalates – plastic softeners which are linked to a range of health concerns, including asthma, allergies, developmental difficulties and cancer.

But the chemical industry has set out to prove that this particular leopard can, indeed, change its spots. “There are no sustainable materials, just as there are no non-sustainable materials,” says Karl Henrik-Robèrt, one of Sweden’s foremost cancer scientists and founder of The Natural Step (TNS), a non-profit environmental education agency. “There are only sustainable and non-sustainable management practices.” Now TNS has joined up with the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) to run a course entitled ‘Leading Change for a Sustainable Chemical Industry’ – and the PVC dilemma is at its heart.

It’s not the first time that TNS has wrestled with the issue. It originally grappled with the stuff in 2000, when, with the support of the UK Environment Agency, it investigated whether PVC could have any place in a sustainable society. The answer was a cautious ‘yes’ – providing the industry addressed some of its most pressing challenges. In the same year, Vinyl 2010 was launched: a sector-wide commitment to cut energy consumption, improve waste management, and minimise the environmental impact of resin and stabilisers. The collaboration has grown to include all 27 EU countries, the European Commission, trade unions, consumer organisations and industry representatives.

Such a broad approach sounds unwieldy, but it’s essential for any chance of progress, says TNS Chief Executive, David Cook. “PVC is a very complicated material with a complicated supply chain and customer base,” he says. “We analysed it at a time when it was being attacked by Greenpeace and the like, and found that there is no one person responsible for [any particular] problem. You need to talk to the whole system.”

Creating change in an industry of this size is no mean task. It employs over half a million people in Europe alone, working in 15 companies dedicated to resin production, 11 specialising in stabilisers, eight in plasticisers, and a mammoth 21,000 converting PVC into consumer products.

“It is not possible to make just one company out of a whole supply chain ‘sustainable’,” says Fiona Wright of BTH. “Ultimately a lot of cross-company collaboration is needed. [You have to] build relationships and trust between the individuals working within those companies. It’s all too easy to forget the time and effort this takes.”

The relationships may be hard to chart, but the results aren’t. Amongst the original EU-15 signatories, the use of lead has been cut by 50% in favour of calcium-based stabilisers, and it’s set to be phased out completely in all EU-27 countries by 2015. Post-consumer recycling has reached nearly 195,000 tonnes, largely due to financial incentives offered by Recovinyl – whose establishment was one of the outcomes of the Vinyl 2010 exercise. PVC is 100% recyclable, and can be broken down mechanically (ground into small pieces that can be reprocessed) or chemically.

As for phthalates, risk assessments have now identified two key areas for attention: their use in medical equipment, and the effect of emissions on ecosystems and populations located near PVC conversion plants.

But do all these results make PVC all right? For Cook, the next step is to look beyond the material itself to the products and services in which it’s used, and how they can be changed to drive down energy use and unnecessary waste. “Innovation for unsustainable products is a complete waste of time, and a tragedy,” he says. What he wants to see is “deep transformation” across the plastics industry – which will require consensus on a much greater scale.  – Iain Aitch

The Natural Step is a Forum for the Future partner.

Click here to learn more about distance courses for the chemical industry.

29 October 2009

Iain Aitch