My House is Your House

A New Documentary, Blue Vinyl, Makes Environmentalism Personal, Humorous and
Very, Very Blue

WITH RARE EXCEPTION , documentary films tends to take themselves seriously. Perhaps too seriously. Because the subject matter of documentaries is often both weighty and complex, many filmmakers strive to reach their audiences through factual presentations and emotional, moral appeals to a person's sense of right and wrong. But that strategy, where environmental issues are concerned, rarely works to win over the sympathies of those who are not already in the eco-friendly camp.

It's difficult to make the environment "sexy," for instance, and drier, more didactic material only goes so far even with those already in agreement with general themes of environmental protection and restoration.

Enter Blue Vinyl, a stunning new documentary film by co-directors and producers, Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold. A modern day answer to Rachel Carson's groundbreaking 1962 book about DDT, Silent Spring, Blue Vinyl is a refreshingly original, candid, and eye-opening film that is as much an illuminating journey into the toxic world of vinyl as it is a humorous romp through the familial and personal dynamics of Helfand and her family.

After earning the 2002 Sundance Festival's "Excellence in Cinematography Award," Blue Vinyl has already gone onto win a number of awards, including First Prize Award for Best Documentary at the acclaimed 2002 Bermuda International Film Festival. On May 5th, the film had its premiere showing on HBO.

Blue Vinyl's vivid, fast-paced tempo and its clever documentary approach revolves around Helfand's desire to understand the potential dangers of the blue vinyl siding which her parents have chosen to replace the rotting wood framing their house.

The siding, as it turns out, is made of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.

A versatile resin, PVC is used in thousands of different ways and shapes, from piping and vinyl siding to carpet fibers and shampoo bottles. (Every three seconds, as Helfand's father calculates, another house is built or reinforced with vinyl siding.) But from an environmental health perspective, as Helfand soon finds out, PVC is also the "poison plastic," posing major toxic hazards to the workers who handle it, the people who live around PVC-manufacturing plants, and even the consumers who purchase it. Byproducts of PVC, as Helfand begins to research the topic, include dioxin and hydrochloric acid.

"My father's answer to rotten wood was looking more and more like someone else's toxic hazard," says Helfand in the film.

In an attempt to convince her Long Island-resident parents to remove the siding and replace it with another, less toxic substance, Helfand sets out to find out anything, and everything, about the vinyl manufacturing process. Even as her parents meet her environmental quest with an often-hilarious dose of East Coast skepticism, Helfand persists. At one point, for instance, Helfand brings two Greenpeace experts over to the house for slide show in the living room about "the most toxic product on earth," but her parents remain utterly unconvinced.

And so, Helfand sets out for Louisiana, where roughly one-third of the nation's PVC is produced. Traveling around Lake Charles, Helfand begins interviewing residents living around the PVC plants who are suffering from all manner of ailments, including cancer. Mostly poor or working-class, and often African American, these residents are confronted with the airborne pollutants that appear to be contaminating their environment, and poisoning their bayous and groundwater to the extent that entire neighborhoods are no longer livable.

But the vinyl industry remains adamant that no danger is posed to the communities surrounding these plants and, in several Michael Moore-style moments, they try to convince Helfand that the sodium chloride that goes into making PVC/vinyl is as natural as anything in one's own body. "Sodium chloride,"says one industry representative in a chipper voice. "If you didn't have it, you wouldn't be here." The vinyl industry has, in fact, been on an aggressive PR campaign to allay lingering concerns about the toxicity of vinyl since a series of large-scale accidents in the 1970s and 80s, including the deaths of four workers at one vinyl plant in Kentucky, and an incident in Las Vegas where many people died at the MGM Grand from inhaling the fumes released from burning PVC.

With a piece of her parent's blue vinyl siding in hand everywhere she goes, Helfand travels across the country—and later to Italy—to gain an even deeper scientific understanding of the "life cycle" of PVC.

Along the way, she meets chemists, researchers, and the widows of workers who died from toxic contamination from working in vinyl-manufacturing plants. Helfand also seeks out interviews with people who are suffering with terminal illnesses and chronic conditions as a result of their exposure to PVC. In one of the most distressing interviews, Helfand meets a man in Italy who is only able to communicate using a voicebox, lending an eerie quality to the story of his employment in an Italian vinyl factory which he believes, resulted in his eventual diagnosis of cancer of the larynx.

It's also in Italy that Helfand meets Dr. Maltoni, a researcher who began studying the effects of PVC on animals in the early 1970s. Maltoni discovered, conclusively, that animals exposed to PVC produced three types of tumors, including ear, kidney, and a rare liver tumor known as angiosarcoma of the liver.

With the damning information in hand, the Italian vinyl industry apparently did everything in its power to prevent the information from getting out. Although the Italian vinyl industry was willing to share its findings with their American industrial counterparts, they did so only with the agreement that the information be kept secret and away from the knowledge of the government.

"It's the nightmare scenario of a concealed toxic hazard," says Billy Baggett, a Louisiana-based attorney who has devoted his life to exposing the vinyl "conspiracy" on the part of industry insiders. The toxic by-products of PVC, as Baggett and many others in the film argue convincingly, has already cost countless lives and yet it still continues to poison the humans and animals that it comes into contact with.

And while the movement against the toxic contamination brought about by PVC is just beginning to gather steam in the U.S., the Italian government recently brought 31 vinyl industry executives up on manslaughter charges for operating plants, despite having knowledge of the potentially fatal dangers of PVC-manufacturing. (All 31 men were eventually acquitted of the charges, much to the dismay of the widows of more than 150 workers.)

Helfand eventually cajoles a vinyl industry spokesman and organic chemist, Dr. William Carroll, to agree to a 30-minute interview. Helfand's preparation for the interview, as well as the interview itself—carefully monitored and coached by the vinyl industry's PR handlers—is simultaneously uproarious and troubling. In essence, the vinyl industry admits to no dangers of their product whatsoever, despite ample evidence to the contrary. From production to incineration (200,000 tons of PVC are incinerated in the U.S. every year, leading to toxic off-gassing), the product that the vinyl industry touts as a miracle plastic appears to be anything but safe.

Finally, Helfand's parents are ready to listen. Begrudgingly, they allow their daughter to find a natural alternative to the vinyl siding on their house—but only if she can do so before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The pressure's on, and viewers follow Helfand on a cross-country search for the perfect substitute. Helfand eventually settles on reclaimed pine from an old mill, for which the filmmaker pays with her "uterus money." It turns out that Helfand is no stranger to the dangers of modern science, having developed a rare cervical cancer by the time she was 25, necessitating a radical hysterectomy. The cause was the chemical DES given to her mother when she was pregnant.

A happy ending? Of sorts. The situation for Helfand's parents has been remedied, but even the neighbors, observing all of Helfand's efforts, still opt for vinyl siding. Drawing comparisons between the campaigns against asbestos a few decades ago and the nascent, community-led battle against vinyl/PVC in the U.S., Helfand and Gold have effectively turned their documentary project into an engaging media tool to inspire conscious consumerism and environmental activism.

An injection of this kind of educated humor is, perhaps, what the often dry and drudging environmental movement needed. If so, Helfand and Gold have delivered exactly that, with a piece of blue vinyl siding in
hand.

Reviewed by Silja J.A. Talvi
05.25.02