DuraShutter ®  World’s most affordable and eco friendly brand

Four (4) United States No: 6,854,211     No: 6,622,433     No: 7,055,231     No: 7,536,766 B1

PVC is not an environmentally friendly product-AKA-FAUX WOOD, POLY and Plastic

Lots of manufactures of PVC shutters and blinds tout their environmental friendliness by talking about the low VOC emissions of their paints or by saying that their product is somehow more environmentally friendly because it’s made from natural gas.  All of these types of claims miss the central point. 

We are going to have to get technical here and go into how PVC is made so you can see just how bad PVC really is. 

The first thing you need is Chlorine. There are two basic ways to make Chlorine. The first involves running a lot of electricity from a Titanium anode through salt water to a liquid Mercury cathode. The big problem here is that the toxic Mercury inevitably escapes into the environment. The other issue is that this process requires very large amounts of electricity. Unfortunately, electricity production is not the most environmentally friendly process. The Mercury process is slowly being phased out, however there are still around 100 of these plants operating throughout the world.  The other way to make Chlorine is the one of the various membrane cell processes. These are similar to the Mercury process in that they still require lots of electricity to pass through salt water. However they don’t use Mercury. The major problem here is the large electricity usage. Whichever process you use you end up with Chlorine gas, Lye (very caustic) and Hydrogen gas (very flammable).

You now have Chlorine gas. Now you have to cool it using lots of water and dry it using Sulfuric acid. Chlorine gas is a deadly chemical that was used in WWI as a war gas and is dangerous to transport. The next thing you need is Ethylene. Ethylene is made by taking oil or natural gas and sending it through a refinery to undergo what’s called cracking. This involves using lots of heat and lots of water to distill different chemicals from the oil or natural gas. The Ethylene is siphoned off during the cracking process and stored.  

OK, now we have Ethylene and we have Chlorine.

Now we have to combine them to make Ethylene Dichloride (1,2-dichloroethane). This involves mixing the Ethylene and the Chlorine with Iron. The resulting Ethylene Dichloride is toxic, corrosive, highly flammable and possibly carcinogenic. If it explodes, Phosgene is created. Phosgene is an extremely dangerous gas that was used in WWI as a war gas. Its high solubility and 50 year half-life in aquifers make it a “perennial pollutant” and health risk that is very expensive to treat conventionally.

Next you have to take the Ethylene Dichloride and heat it. This breaks it down to Vinyl Chloride and Hydrochloric acid. These two steps need a lot of heat and pressure and produce a lot of polluted acid water, which has to be de-acidified and treated before it’s released into the environment. Some compounds can’t be treated and the have to be burned. There is some evidence that this process also creates dioxin. Samples taken downstream from EDC manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe indicate significant contamination of sediment and the food chain in the vicinity of these plants. There is also some indication that Dioxins are produce when the waste compounds are burned.

World’s most eco friendly is DuraShutter®

Emily Main, editor National Geographic about Faux Wood Blinds and shutters