Blue Vinyl, Red Alert

by Jacquelyn Ottman

Early in the feature documentary “Blue Vinyl,” filmmaker and on-screen narrator Judith Helfand utters the condemning words, “My father’s answer to rotting wood was looking more and more like someone else’s toxic hazard.” The film, which picked up numerous awards while touring the film festival circuit last year, chronicles Helfand’s investigation of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) after her parents re-covered their Long Island house with – you guessed it – blue vinyl siding.

While funny episodes portray Helfand’s arguments with her parents about the siding, widows of cancer victims show another side of the story, and in-your-face criticism asks people to think twice about the many vinyl products they use every day. Filled with “Gen-x” attitude and personal bias, “Blue Vinyl” joins a number of other persuasive efforts bubbling up from the grassroots these days against products viewed as particularly destructive to the environment and/ or personal health. With an administration that’s lax on environmental protection, grassroots campaigns against vinyl, SUVs, tobacco, and fur may represent just the beginning.

Almost every consumer product category has a dark underside of one kind or another. Thus Blue Vinyl sends a red alert to manufacturers of all consumer products: win the trust of your stakeholders or risk being the subject of grassroots efforts against you.

But risk can be avoided. And environmental issues can be turned into opportunities to gain market share and win the trust of skeptical stakeholders. Start by following these principles: make an effort, be seen to be green, be transparent, take responsibility for life cycle impacts, and help people make the right choices.

1. Make an Effort
The manufacturing process to produce PVC is very toxic and affects workers in low income communities where most factories are located. Every company can make improvements when it comes to pollution and the relationship with workers and the local community. Make sure yours are meaningful, serious improvements, not superficial ones. People know the difference.

2. Be Seen to Be Green
Stakeholders don’t expect businesses to be squeaky clean – they know products and processes use resources and create waste. But they do expect you to be making continuous progress. So, communicate your company’s efforts as broadly as possible, developing special corporate environmental and sustainability reports for the most discriminating audiences. Don’t forget in-house organs as employees want to be informed, and in turn, can send positive messages to the community.

3. Be Transparent
Helfand meets for a closely monitored interview with a representative of the Vinyl Institute, being sure to bring extra cameras to “film them filming us.” Eschewing the stereotype of the stiff, defensive corporate spokesman, win over your own skeptics and detractors with brutal honesty. Several examples come to mind: Patagonia’s “Enviro Action” statement begins with the sentence, “Everything we make pollutes.” The Body Shop’s in-store informational materials describe the pros and cons of each product, reminding consumers that although ingredients may be biodegradable, their packaging is not. In their sustainability report, Interface, the carpet company, announced, “We are not sustainable” and its CEO at the time, Ray Anderson went so far as to declare; “Some day they will put people like me in jail.”

Speaking of CEOs, a visible CEO can go a long way in creating trust between a company and its stakeholders. The “Ben and Jerry’s” of the corporate world – John Brownes and Yvon Chouniards – win over stakeholders by projecting a personal commitment to the environment. Executives such as these help to forge an emotional bond between the company and its customers, acting as a symbolic police officer who watches over corporate operations. They are especially believable because they are perceived as having a personal stake in the outcome.

4. Take Responsibility.
Products made with PVC can be harmful when burned or landfilled. Vinyl can be recycled, but according to the Vinyl Institute’s own published research, only 2% of recycled vinyl comes from post-consumer sources. As suggested by Helfand’s and her parents’ struggle to dispose of their vinyl siding safely (they finally decide to chop it up into necklaces which are distributed at viewings), the vinyl industry may be missing out on a huge opportunity to reclaim its material from users, reducing risk and cutting source material costs or at least advise customers on safe disposal practices. Other industries and manufacturers have turned such lessons into profits.

Eastman-Kodak redesigned its camera bodies for take-back and recycling after Greenpeace called its one-time use camera, the Fling, “an environmental offense.” The industry followed suit and one-time use cameras are now the most commonly recycled product after aluminum cans. The program has achieved a 70% participation rate and saves Kodak and its competitors millions of dollars. On the business-to-business front, Xerox leases copiers to customers, who pay only for the number of copies produced, not the machines. The machines are returned to Xerox at the end of their useful life for safe disposal or remanufacturing.

5. Help People Make the Right Choices
One of Helfand’s disappointments in the documentary is that she never finds an economically viable alternative to her parents’ vinyl siding; one that would be affordable, fit their neighborhood’s aesthetic, and provide less environmental liability, not to mention, as she says, being available at Home Depot. (Apparently, there has never been enough consumer pressure on vinyl to open the market for economic alternatives.)

She does discover some environmentally preferable – although more expensive – alternatives including cedar siding, stucco and brick. She eventually settles on the rather expensive solution of using reclaimed wood with a non-toxic blue stain. Viewers are also sent to a web site, [sorry this link is no longer available], for further information and education.

The documentary succeeds in helping to create demand for alternatives, and raising awareness among consumers to consider the total lifecycle impacts of the products they buy.

Recognizing that the greatest impacts associated with doing the laundry with conventional washing machines and detergents occur during the “in use” stage, members of Europe’s A.I.S.E. trade association for soap and detergent manufacturers are running a “Washright” campaign educating people about how to reduce the environmental impacts of doing laundry. Participating companies can display a logo on detergent packages. The campaign staves off eventual European Commission mandates while providing manufacturers an image boost for helping consumers do the right thing.

In 1990, the clothing company Espirt ran ads headlined, “A Plea for Responsible Consumption”, asking people “not to buy anything you don’t need including ou
r products.” Years later, the company still received positive comments. Individual manufacturers may not be pushed to this extreme, but all should take heed of signs from the grassroots suggesting that greater scrutiny of seemingly benign products awaits.

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