Material Research: Inside the News
$15M PVC flooring detained in Newark; Disasters map reached 150K views; Details revealed on toxic train disaster's biggest problem: vinyl chloride
Material Research strives not to have our name in the news, but to have our information inside the news. Several very recent cases:
CNBC, April 14, 2023 and Floor Covering News, April 18, 2023
"We're holding ~200 container loads" of vinyl flooring in a Newark/NY Port warehouse, worth $15 million,” a US Customs and Border Protection official told CNBC.
This crackdown follows our investigative collaboration with Laura Murphy and Nyrola Elimä, Built on Repression. It revealed the supply chain connection between vinyl flooring sold in the U.S. and PVC plastic made in the Uyghur Region. China state-backed companies use forced labor and extremely polluting processes to make PVC.Officials began detaining vinyl flooring in February under the #UFLPA. According to Floor Covering News, none of the detained containers have been released as of April 13. “It appears this logjam could last several months unless (or until) U.S. Customs and Border Patrol eases up on its strict burden-of-proof measures.”
FCN reports that some retailers have started to turn to U.S.-made, non-vinyl flooring products to fill orders.
Still of CBP officer with detained vinyl flooring (CNBC).
NBC Nightly News, April 17, 2023
"A coalition of groups working to track and prevent chemical disasters estimates there's a chemical fire, explosion or toxic release once every other day."
The evening news report features a map of chemical incidents that Material Research maintains for the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters. The map has had more than 150,000 views since it launched last month.
New York Times, April 17, 2023 ; Courier-Post (N.J.), April 19, 2023 ; Orion magazine, April 2023
"An analysis published this month by Toxic-Free Future, a nonprofit that advocates safer products and chemicals, found that PVC plastics plants reported releasing more than 400,000 pounds of vinyl chloride into the air in 2021,” reports Hiroko Tabuchi in the New York Times. “It also found that people of color were overrepresented in communities near such plants, making up more than 60 percent of the almost 400,000 people who live within three miles of a vinyl-chloride, PVC-manufacturing or PVC-waste-disposal facility, compared with the 40 percent share they make up of the general population."
This analysis and many more details are found in our spreadsheet for Toxic Free Future.Hiroko Tabuchi in the NYT reveals the origin and destination for the train cars of vinyl chloride that caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in February: the cars were loaded at OxyVinyl’s plant in La Porte, Texas (just east of Houston), and were bound for OxyVinyls PVC plant in Pedricktown, New Jersey.
A follow-up story in the Courier-Post observes, “Had the cars reached South Jersey, they would have followed the same route as a train that derailed in Paulsboro in November 2012, releasing clouds of vinyl chloride that rolled across communities in Gloucester and Salem counties. The cars involved in the 2012 accident also were bound for the Pedricktown plant.”
Manifest of Toxic Train Cars bound for OxyVinyls in New Jersey, from EPA Administrative Order, Feb. 21, 2023
This month, Orion magazine published a meditation by toxics historian Rebecca Altman on vinyl. She writes,
Plastics is a system held up by toxics. By chemicals exemplified by vinyl chloride monomer. As well as by processes that make the intermediates that make the monomers that make the plastics. That system is laid bare when trains linking nodes in plastics’ vast petrochemical network ignite or are, as also happened in Ohio, intentionally burned.
The East Palestine disaster makes plain just how many communities are enveloped by plastics and have experienced both routine releases and environmental disasters linked to its production.