A new article by respected environmental journalist Marla Cone lays bare the question of whether the or not the real consequences of human chemical exposures are valued by the US green building movement as it debates a PVC-related materials credit for the US Green Building Council's LEED green building rating system.
Cone's latest report, Dozens of Words for Snow, None for Pollution, is an eyewitness rendering of life at ground zero of toxic pollution, the Circumpolar Arctic, which she dubs "the planet's chemical trash can, the final destination for toxic waste that originates thousands of miles away". She's talking about chemicals such as POPs, Persistent Organic Pollutants. To understand how natural forces conspire to carry the most toxic industrial pollutants northward to the earth's most pristine environment, recall the ozone hole, then factor in migrating, contaminated wildlife. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants sets a goal of elimination for 12 of these chemicals. Four of them are unintentional byproducts of the PVC lifecycle: hexachlorobenzene, dioxins, furans, and PCBs, as is mercury, a by-product of some chlorine facilities.
Cone documents PCBs and mercury in babies' cord blood and mothers' milk in the Arctic at 50 times higher than in urban areas of the United States and Europe, affecting between 60% to 95% of women and children in various communities, and having measurable impacts on the babies including, lower birth weight, impaired memory skills and difficulty in processing new information. Earlier studies have found that dioxin concentrations in Inuit mothers' milk are twice the levels observed in southern Quebec.
The hard truth Cone reveals is that 650,000 native people of the circumpolar North are literally forced to pick their poison: the chemicals, bioaccumulated in the fatty meat of the marine mammals and seafood the Inuit eat as a matter of culture and routine, or the expensive sugars, carbs and fat in the rations shipped to their convenience stores from outside. Canadian authorities agree with the Aboriginal leaders - the traditional diet is the most affordable, plentiful, and otherwise healthy food for them. But the people are anxious, anxious like most of us never know, anxious in the way you get when you're not sure whether you are feeding your child something poisonous.
None of this human suffering, none of the PCBs and none of the mercury, appear to register among the data fields, formulas and models that USGBC is currently using to evaluate what it calls hypothetical receptors and pathways for exposure contaminants associated with building products. Which raises the question: What scientific ethic, what green building principle, what institutional value at the USGBC, is elevated by this decision to ignore evidence of an infant receptor, if you will, of PCBs, Mercury and Dioxin via the pathway, if you wish to call it that, of the womb and mother's milk?
We stopped using asbestos when we found it was killing people. We didn’t perform life cycle assessments to determine if it was a better product than the alternatives. We stopped using it. If PVC cannot be used for windows in LEED projects, then window manufacturers will find another plastic to build windows out of and market transformation will begin. LEED must LEAD!! |