Blue Vinyl and Environmental Justice Part I

 Blue Vinyl and environmental justice

Blue Vinyl highlights environmental justice and racism issues associated with both production of housing materials and the housing industry. Helfand introduces these issues by documenting the environmental effects of home construction after talking with her parents about new siding for their home. Their red wood is rotten and must be replaced. Helfand’s mother thinks her daughter overreacts to the family’s choice to replace their old wood siding with vinyl. But because Helfand had a rare form of cervical cancer caused by the DES her mother was given during pregnancy, worries about toxic chemicals used in vinyl’s PVC production are a priority for her now. Helfand’s poignant documentary and video diary, A Healthy Baby Girl (1997) illustrates the sense of loss she encountered after the cancer forced her to undergo a radical hysterectomy.  In her exploration of the ecology of home building, Helfand wonders, then, is vinyl siding safe? Blue Vinyl documents the years of detective work Helfand and her co-director Gold perform to discover and reveal their answers.

The film has been both heralded and slammed, primarily because of its rhetorical strategies. It won numerous awards and received laudable reviews  from many reviewers.[2] Other reviewers, however, highlighted weaknesses. For example, The City Paper suggests the film’s narrative may be “manufactured” or “at least jury-rigged.” Reviewer Christopher Null describes it as “extremely long,” and Bill Durodie of the conservative website “Culture Wars” calls Blue Vinyl “a case study in dumbing down.” For us, however, even though Helfand and Gold’s documentary journey to reveal the dangers of PVC production and use may be diluted by Helfand’s choice to personalize the issue in relation to her parents’ siding and her own health issues, it effectively illustrates and addresses environmental injustices of home construction.

Blue Vinyl effectively documents the disastrous consequences faced by residents and workers denied environmental justice. According to the EPA,

“Environmental justice ensures that no population, especially the elderly and children, are forced to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the negative human health and environmental impacts of pollution or other environmental hazard.”

Environmental justice breaks down into three distinctive categories: procedural inequity, geographical inequity, and social inequity. These categories serve as the basis for the UN Draft Principles on Human Rights and the Environment, which state:

1. “Human rights, an ecologically sound environment, sustainable development and peace are interdependent and indivisible.
2. All persons have the right to a secure, healthy and ecologically sound environment. The right and other human rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights, are universal, interdependent and indivisible.
3. All persons shall be free from any form of discrimination in regard to actions and decisions that affect the environment.” (Cifuentes and Frumkin 1-2)

By integrating interview data into a personal journey from a Long Island home to the source of its vinyl siding, Lake Charles, Louisiana, the film successfully illustrates the dangerous ramifications to the health and welfare of residents and workers when denied an ecologically sound and healthy environment and forced to endure environmental discrimination and the environmental racism associated with it.