The vinyl chloride industry made headlines across the country last winter when a train carrying the flammable, carcinogenic chemical derailed near the town of East Palestine, Ohio. News outlets published dystopian images of the smoke plume released by a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride cars, and thousands of people were evacuated from their homes.
Months later, when several environmental organizations, including the nonprofit Beyond Plastics, began advocating for the Environmental Protection Agency to consider banning vinyl chloride, the Vinyl Institute, an industry trade group, called their petition “a publicity stunt that irresponsibly ignores decades of credible science that shows VCM [vinyl chloride monomer] is safely and responsibly manufactured in the United States.”
In February, a blog post published by the Institute asserted that 95 percent of vinyl chloride manufactured in the U.S. is transported by pipeline to facilities on the same property, and that train accidents involving vinyl chloride are “exceedingly rare.”
The Institute insists that vinyl chloride and the product it’s most often used to make, polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a plastic commonly found in pipes and flooring and known for its durability, are safe, and that protections for workers and the public have improved since the 1970s, when stricter regulations were passed.
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But a new report published on Tuesday by Beyond Plastics and Earthjustice, the environmental law nonprofit, shows that derailments, leaks and other accidents are far from unusual in the vinyl chloride industry, casting doubt on the Institute’s narrative. In a comprehensive look at decades of manufacturing, storage and transportation-related incidents involving vinyl chloride, the report found that accidents have happened on average “once every five days since 2010.”
The report’s findings are based on information gathered from government sources like the Toxics Release Inventory and Chemical Data Reporting as well as local news reports, customs records and trade statistics.
“Nine hundred and sixty-six incidents since 2010 is incredible to me,” said Jim Vallette, the president of Material Research L3C, the research company that produced the report. “The industry does a lot of talking about how clean it is, but I think you can see in the raw data here how ubiquitous this industry’s impacts are. I hope that this provides a record that starts to lead regulators to be skeptical of industry-supplied data.”
In a press conference on Tuesday, Jess Conard, a resident of East Palestine and now Appalachia Director for Beyond Plastics, spoke about the lessons learned from the derailment and its aftermath. “We must recognize that what happened here in East Palestine, Ohio is not an isolated incident, but a symptom of a global crisis,” she said. “It’s not a matter of if another vinyl chloride incident will happen, but when.”
The report states that 30 percent of vinyl chloride in the U.S. is transported by rail or ship before it’s made into PVC, far more than the 5 percent claimed by the industry. PVC manufacturers in New Jersey, Illinois, Texas and Mississippi “receive 3.6 billion pounds of vinyl chloride by rail each year,” and there have been at least 29 cases where train cars carrying vinyl chloride derailed, triggering the evacuation of more than 40,000 people living near accident sites from Louisiana to Pennsylvania. A January report from Toxic Free Future, an environmental health organization, estimated that more than 3 million people live within one mile of a rail route currently used to move vinyl chloride from Texas to New Jersey. Vinyl chloride’s toxicity and explosiveness make it particularly dangerous to transport, Vallette said.
In the past 60 years, at least 14 people have died and 120 have been injured because of vinyl chloride accidents at industrial sites, records show. Of the 966 chemical incidents examined by the report, 930 occurred at vinyl chloride or PVC manufacturing and processing facilities; the rest happened during transport or waste management or at specialty chemical plants. “The frequency of these incidents reveals they are a feature rather than an anomaly,” the authors write.
In December, the EPA announced that vinyl chloride would be one of five chemicals selected to begin the process for risk evaluation prioritization that is governed by the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. This designation is a preliminary step in a years-long process that must be followed under TSCA to ban or restrict a chemical in the U.S. The process could take as long as seven or eight years to complete, depending on whether the agency needs the maximum time allotted for each deadline, said Eve Gartner, director of crosscutting toxics strategies at Earthjustice. Following the announcement, the EPA invited public comments on vinyl chloride, and this report will be submitted to the agency as part of that review.
“The EPA has a solemn responsibility to protect all residents and workers from exposure to this toxic chemical, and we urge the Biden administration to not bow to the vinyl industry’s efforts to minimize vinyl chloride’s harms,” said Judith Enck, the president of Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, in a press release.
The health effects of vinyl chloride exposure have been studied for decades. The EPA already classifies vinyl chloride as a “human carcinogen” because of its links to a rare form of liver cancer, and exposure to the chemical can also cause headaches, drowsiness, dizziness and irritation to the eyes and respiratory tract. Vinyl chloride was banned for use in aerosol products like paints, solvents and adhesives in 1974. The EPA banned its use in drugs and cosmetics the same year.
In their February 2024 article, the Vinyl Institute argued that vinyl chloride “makes modern life possible.”
“As a building block for hundreds of products, the chemical enables the safe production and use of technologies that can be seen all around us. From life-saving blood bags, sustainable water pipes, car interiors and televisions to durable flooring, furniture, wall coverings and electrical wiring—even the cables that connect us to the internet—are all possible thanks to VC,” they wrote. “The simple fact is that six decades of research and real-world use prove VC is safe. Exposure to VC is nearly non-existent today.”
Between 2010 and 2022, companies released 6.3 million pounds of vinyl chloride into the air, according to the report. Air releases of vinyl chloride in the U.S. are clustered in Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky. Kentucky is home to the largest producer of vinyl chloride emissions, the Westlake Chemicals facility in Calvert City. The Philadelphia-Wilmington metro area is another hot spot, accounting for 13 percent of air releases between 2010 and 2022. PVC facilities in Pedricktown, New Jersey, are responsible for those releases; the train cars in the East Palestine disaster were headed across Pennsylvania to Pedricktown before they derailed.
The report notes several other pathways for vinyl chloride exposure in the U.S.: Vinyl chloride contamination has been found at 699 Superfund sites, in children’s toys and in PVC pipes used to carry drinking water. Since 2021, six vinyl chloride facilities “have been found to be in violation of the Clean Water Act” for wastewater discharges.
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In addition to rail accidents, the report gathers data about the movement of vinyl chloride exports, which are largely shipped to facilities in Mexico and Colombia on huge tankers carrying up to 10 million pounds each. The report describes a 1995 accident in Texas involving a tanker transporting vinyl chloride that collided with a barge, prompting the evacuation of 2,700 people. “East Palestine would look like a minor incident compared to a ship full of vinyl chloride,” Vallette said, of the explosive risk posed by this form of chemical transport.
“I think that the evidence that is in the report describes a chronic condition of exposure to workers and communities in the factories and between factories that is unavoidable because of the nature of the chemical,” Vallette said. “All evidence points to a need to reduce that risk. And the only way to reduce that risk is to reduce its production.”
Conard implored the EPA to act, saying that the disaster in East Palestine should become “the last straw that led to the finalization of banning vinyl chloride.”
“What happened in East Palestine, Ohio was 100 percent preventable,” she said. “And we can prevent the next one from happening.”
Kiley Bense
Reporter, Pennsylvania
Kiley Bense covers climate change and the environment with a focus on Pennsylvania, politics, energy, and public health. She has reported on the effects of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, the expansion of the American plastics industry, and the intersection of climate change and culture. Her previous work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Believer, and Sierra Magazine, and she holds master’s degrees in journalism and creative writing from Columbia University. She is based in Pennsylvania.
