US begins review that could eventually lead to PVC ban | Hacker News Reader

US begins review that could eventually lead to PVC ban

phys.org

78 pointsNoRagrets86 comments

There's a terrific documentary film called Blue Vinyl[0] about how vinyl and PVC products are made. While inert in its usable form, vinyl is one of the most toxic products on earth to manufacture and dispose of -- and it's in a lot of stuff!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Vinyl

It seems like the title could benefit from the word "production" at the end for clarity

> The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday announced a review that could eventually lead to the end of PVC plastic production

There's a long way to go before PVC use is banned in the US

If you can't produce it you won't be able to use it soon. A waterpipe breaks? You replace it with something else, not PVC, not lead. I have no idea what's a suitable material. Steel? Of course you might import all the PVC you need, but do you want to do that?

I would say it is likely that importing it would be the most cost-effective option, so it’ll still be used heavily. I imagine it’ll only fall heavily in usage if its manufacturing is outlawed in the places where importing it from would be cheap. I think that is pretty unlikely.

And if production is banned, industry is going to likely want to find something else to do with the input materials, which could easily be exporting it to where the production gets outsourced to.

Any legislation stemming from this effort would (and should) ostensibly forbid the import of said material, otherwise the production will shift overseas while usage will not noticably change.

In many cases that's the point. You don't want your own citizens to suffer manufacturing it, but you want them to enjoy the benefits of using it, so you ban manufacture but still allow use and just import everything you need.

It's like how all the asbestos and other hazardous waste that's removed from California homes gets dumped in Nevada and Arizona landfills. Or the subject of the documentary "Plastic China":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Kif9cugQ0

    "No contest"

(in "the voice"... What was it, Super Smash Brothers on GC? ;D)

Edit: Found it - https://youtube.com/watch?v=sHBsF8SKLGU&t=20

You can argue the should but I very much doubt that it would. We are very happy to let other countries do the dirty work of manufacturing and import the product, and the places that are most likely to manufacture are the least likely to outlaw the production themselves.

Why do you think it would do that, if the import poses no risk to the inhabitants of the country?

For potable water? PEX or HDPE. Annoyingly, PVC pipe is usually Schedule 40, and the others are usually CTS (copper tube size). So an extra complicated adapter would be needed. But one can connect PVC to PEX or HDPE or copper with a push-to-connect fitting.

PVC is also made in CTS size, it's very commonly used for underground service lines to homes.

Less common inside a home, but certainly available.

If you’re trying to repair an existing schedule 40 system, though, you’ll need some kind of schedule 40 fitting.

Hope we don’t go back to iron. Stuff is rotting away in my mothers home and her gaskets get destroyed by the rust and have to be replaced every year. I would like copper but but it is expensive and there are people who complain about the lead.

Lead isn't used in new copper installations nor in bronze fittings for potable water.

Lead is still legal in hot water supply lines, which is why you can only get “hot water” fixtures for certain sizes of lines at Home Depot:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-3-4-in-FIP-x-3-4-in-FIP...

This is the only choice for 3/4 FIP that I can find there. Such lines are used by our water filter and softener. The brass connectors are leaded, and it has a prop 65 warning.

The end result of this loophole is that you probably have at least some leaded plumbing in your home.

Edit: From the product manual.

> Important Information Stainless Steel Water Heater Water Connectors

> WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

> Lead Free: The wetted surface of this product contacted by consumable water contains less than one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of lead by weight.

Note that the wetted surface standard is because this part is electroplated, and they test it with intact plating. The manual goes on to say you need to inspect it every 6 months, or more often if you have hard water.

I’m guessing most people don’t disassemble and reassemble their home’s plumbing supply lines every few months to see if the brass has been exposed due to contact with water.

It says lead free though. Are you sure it’s not actually lead free brass and not the free machining kind?

They define lead free in the sentence that makes the claim. The last time I looked carefully at this part, I found it was illegal to use it for drinking water supplies. This would be less of a big deal if they stocked lines for potable water, but they do not.

This is why you shouldn’t drink or cook with hot water supply.

https://www.epa.gov/lead/why-cant-i-use-hot-water-tap-drinki...

Yep, that's one reason. And, in general, don't water plants with it either.

Also, in houses with soft water, typically the only inside non-soft water supply is the cold kitchen tap. Poorly repiped homes skip this step and deliver soft water to all taps, none of which can be used to water plants.

Furthermore, in the US, it's foolish to make it a habit to drink or cook with tap water when RO is available. US tap water has never been universally safe and reliable, most of it tastes terrible, and there is no reason to not protect your family and yourself with an insurance policy should there be a water safety problem.

Most of us don't have any ability to install a system like that. I'm not even supposed to nail things into the wall, let alone install a RO water system in my rental.

You can do lead free solder joints.

You're complaining about iron and your solution is copper?! Iron has a longer life expectancy, better failure condition, and is less expensive.

Copper is more corrosion resistant than iron. Cast iron and galvanized pipes are usually swapped out for copper or plastic.

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/plumbing/reviews/types-of-plumb...

Also way more expensive, getting even more expensive and being very much sought after by the EV industry. It's quite easy to work with, I'll grant you that. And looks good compared to Pex/PPR. But we decided to limit its use to boiler rooms. For solar panel installations we went to flexible corrugated stainless steel tubing.

That's not the whole story. Galvanized contrasted with copper: faster scale accumulation, harder to work with, more difficult repairs, and more self-welding. When copper was cheap, it was the clear winner. Old galvanized is a PITA.

No one uses cast iron anymore because it's a huge PITA and brittle.

PS: MAPP (substitute) gas is the only way to do copper soldering. Propane is a waste of time.

Just use pex-al-pex. It's the best thing there is by a longshot.

It depends. PPR is better outside where it's freezing.

What on earth is going on in your mother's home that cast iron is rotting away? I've been in homes well over 100 years old where everything else has been ripped out and replaced apart from the original cast iron that just keeps on doing its job.

Depending on the water quality, cast iron water supply pipes will slowly rust themselves shut or rust towards failure. Could last 100 years, potentially much shorter. All depends on the water supply chemistry.

For supply, I prefer copper but will tolerate pex. I also prefer soldering copper over compression fittings, but that’s more personal preference (although compression fittings [“Viega ProPress”] are great if you need to move fast, can’t get a hot permit in a commercial setting, and you’re confident in the compression fitting’s rubber seal).

PVC piping is heavily used in water and sewage applications. It replaced the previously aging cast iron plumbing. What’s going to replace PVC if production ban is in effect?

It’s also pretty heavily used in electrical conduit and flex. Underground and outdoor flex may not have ready substitutes listed/approved and added to NEC for a while.

In the northern part of the US, there's no good alternative for protecting buildings from the elements. You have brick, glass, wood, and vinyl...which is the nice one. It has to be plastic (for windows) to expand and contract, but be easy to replace. It has to be moisture/ice proof. It has to be durable to impact (due to wind and storm). Brick is fine, until it breaks down and is very poor for temperature control.

The north doesn’t use concrete based products like hardieboard? It’s better than wood siding and pretty much looks identical to wood siding. No issues with temp control, and essentially never rots besides needing a repaint every …. 10-15 years maybe. Also, I thought fiberglass windows are a reasonable alternative to vinyl windows?

Cast iron :P Seriously, aside from requiring more skill to work with and not surviving well with large DC leakage currents (think: DC traction power from light rail), it's got a lot of advantages.

Plastic piping in general is already disallowed in a lot of commercial construction.

ABS is a valid alternative in some parts of the country, but is often already banned from being used in even residential construction in places where it gets very cold in the winter, as it shatters easily.

I would say weight is an other drawback... At larger diameters segments get heavy and that brings own risks. Including things like stress injuries for workers.

Ugh, yeah, it can be a bear. Try dropping a 3-storey stack that's freeze fractured and ready to come apart on you :/

> aside from requiring more skill to work with

This is an understatement. This would essentially kill off plumbing as a DIY task and be a huge boon for professional plumbers.

Copper is perfectly viable for interior small diameter pipe. Home owners aren't typically DIYing a cast iron main sewer.

Copper piping is unfortunately several orders of magnitude more susceptible to corrosion from a variety of sources: water acidity, high temperatures, and exposure to common household chemicals like bleach and drain cleaner.

Also CO2. Boiler condensate will eat copper pipe very quickly.

And some well water and reverse-osmosis-filtered water is not so friendly to copper.

Remember that most cast iron isn't like it was for hundreds of years, nowadays there's no-hub and even if you do need to use hub and spigot, lots of folks use the neoprene bushing instead of oakum...and if you're still using oakum, you can usually use a modern sealant that comes in a caulk tube, instead of molten lead.

Why not aluminium?

One reason might be that aluminum reacts with sodium hydroxide (lye), which is used in just about every drain cleaning product.

"Yep, that 5" hole in the side of the pipe sure keeps everything flowing."

Heh.

The manufacturer could put a warning label on it, but you and I both know how well that's going to work in practice.

Edit: oh, and the reaction produces large quantities of hydrogen gas, for extra fun.

It reacts with acids and bases, so using the other half of drain cleaners that are sulfuric or hydrochloric acid won't help.

I'm not a metallurgist, but it has been my observation that it deteriorates over time with hot / cold cycles. When I walk into a house built in the 1950s with aluminum pipe, I generally advise homeowners to expect to need to replace it within their time per ownership as my plumber friends have advised it has around a 75 year life at best.

Classic cast iron drain pipe was connected with by pouring molten lead into the joints after packing them with oakum. Real medieval technology.

I'm not super-fond of the so-called "no-hub" joints for cast iron. IMO, the rubber is just waiting to deteriorate underground and cause an expensive nightmare 20 years down the road.

The no-hub also won't carry the weight that hub and spigot cast iron will. I've seen a few roof drains come apart in business ceilings because the old cast iron was replaced with hub and spigot, and no one adjusted the spacing on the clevis hangers. First major rain, and there's too much weight for the no-hub couplings!

You can of course run extra heavy no-hub couplers (four or more worm clamps per joint).

Did some DIY in the US (PEX and PVC), now live in nordics; water pipes here are copper (or PEX). Expensive, but basically just really tiny EMT conduit, so totally fine to DIY.

Guide for the perplexed:

DIY: do-it-yourself (fairly widely known)

PEX: Cross-linked polyethylene, a form of polyethylene with cross-links. Increasingly prevalent in plumbing applications.

PCV: Polyvinyl chloride, a common plastic pipe, often white or black, may be rigid or flexible, widely used in plumbing for decades. "the world's third-most widely produced synthetic polymer of plastic (after polyethylene and polypropylene)" per Wikipedia.

EMT: Electrical metallic tubing.

Erm, that should be PVC, rather than PCV.

Is cast iron really so great for drainage? I get that it’s quiet and has nice mechanical properties, but acidic and/or oxidizing waste seems quite likely to eat it. So your bathroom sink, toilet and laundry are fine, but your kitchen sink?

I would much rather use ABS in applications where it works.

The kitchen sink must not be too hard on it, after all it hits the main stack eventually :P I've seen a lot of NY state cast iron cast at the Monitor Iron Works, like Monitor and Merrimack, the US Civil War era ironclad warships. Still in service, still not leaking. Now of course that's survivor bias!

You usually don't need expansion joints on cast iron...not that most residential construction gets them even when they are needed.

It's detectable in an X-ray, unlike PVC, though I doubt that's of interest to 99% of DWV applications!

No-hub is easier to adjust and rework than glued plastic pipe, as you can always loosen the coupling. Hub-and-spigot with rubber gaskets is effectively permanent, you have to seat it with lube and a mechanical assist puller usually. On the old lead and oakum joints, you can always dig out the lead to change orientation (not fun), or caulk it (as in with irons) more if there's seepage on a line.

My house had no shortage of cast iron DWV pipes leading from the kitchen that needed replacing. Fortunately they were accessible.

All plumbing ought to be, it all fails. I still have a few more bits of galvanized screwpipe in our current house to replace, but what's left is closed up in walls :/

Cast iron is also not a problem at all to recycle -- it just gets to be woodstoves or brake rotors or more cast iron pipe or something. IMO that is one of its largest strengths as a sustainable building material.

Sorry I keep thinking of great things about it: fire blocking and resistance. You don't have to fireblock around it with intumescent caulk or foam on firewall penetrations (and everyone on HN likes things that can traverse a firewall without needing special protections for when they fail when the heat is on, right?!)

It also does not produce toxic smoke if there's a fire.

Nothing will, we are just fine with PVC as long as the pollution happens elsewhere.

Outsourcing production

Other plastics? HDPE? PEX? Corrugated HDPE and is already replacing PVC for underground drainage pipes.

Direct non-AMP link: https://phys.org/news/2023-12-pvc.html

I wonder if the industry could economically rearrange itself to produce and consume vinyl chloride in the same plant — go straight from the feedstock (ethylene and chlorine?) to PVC resin in the same plant. This could avoid needing to transport and store the stuff.

The old Dow Chemical plant in Freeport, TX does this (now sold off in pieces and owned/operated by Olin and several other companies). They start from salt-water (for chlorine) and refined crude oil (for carbon and hydrogen), and process them through many units into a huge array of final products. Sadara in Saudi Arabia follows a similar highly integrated strategy as well.

Most of East Houston (Deer Park, Bayport, Baytown, etc.) is technically lots of discrete independent refineries and chemical plants, but they have a highly integrated dense network of pipelines and tank farms through which they can each sell chemicals to their neighbors, so for many intents and purposes it's similar enough to what you're asking for, but there is an increased amount of rail transport because it can be difficult to install quite as many new pipelines through multiple other companies' land.

This[0] is the unit (400 feet x 350 feet) inside the old Dow plant which combines chlorine gas and ethylene gas to make ethylene dichloride, which is later turned into vinyl chloride monomer and then polyvinyl chloride. If you zoom out, you'll notice three large chemical plants, each with many process units, stretching for about 8 miles. These three plants are all integrated with eachother in the manner you describe.

As a byproduct it produces a decent amount of polychlorinated biphenyls[1] which is usually re-circulated to break it down and re-react it, but occasionally it leaks out of pumps and such and there's no "good" way to clean it up. It's a particularly carcinogenic pollutant which lasts a very, very long time in the environment. I believe burning PVC (for example, in a house fire) will also produce some amount of PCB's.

0: https://maps.app.goo.gl/q4hpLGQqmb2zcJyH6

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl

If just PVC production is banned, there’ll still be demand for it, shifting production overseas, where safety regulations may be worse than in the US. I’m not convinced this would really be a good thing.

Usually, there's a politically driven initiative to ban something without giving any real thought to the long-term unintended consequences. (This is essentially the story of the entire EPA's existence.) Often these initiatives are spearheaded by vocal groups with murky agendas.

So what are we going to use for Drain-Waste-Vent plumbing? Go back to cast iron with oakum and lead?

Ductile iron pipe and concrete?

(Disclaimer: Not an expert at all, so could be totally wrong... but I remember those terms from many moons ago when I worked on an M&A deck for some American pipe company that hated competition from Chinese PVC pipe manufacturers. Not a fun project)

Ugh, no screwpipe, that was a 1950s housing boom compromise that should never be repeated!

First person to suggest Orangeburg gets to dig up 100 feet of collapsed lateral in winter.

Given the asbestos content, that's not really an option anyway, yeah?

The real low quality stuff was just wood fibers and coal tar, IIRC!

Could PEX (cross linked polyethylene) fill the gap? It’s already used in residential. Plus more flexible than PVC

Flexible is bad for drains, you get sagging leading to water pooling the pipe.

My impression is PEX is the standard for modern plumbing, but I don't know about drains specifically. Maybe we will find it also has issues, but it seems like every modern material has externalities.

Pex is used in water supply, not drain and vent.

Probably basalt-lined pipe.

Soldered DWV copper is also acceptable :P Doubt we'll be going back to wiped lead...

It's a 10ft drain pipe, Michael. What could it cost? $500?

ABS pipe?

So if I understand correctly, all the risks come from manufacture and disposal.

While the use of PVC piping, vinyl siding, playing LP's... these are perfectly fine.

I obviously don't want workers to suffer, so if this needs to be banned for health reasons, so be it. It's good news nobody needs to replace existing pipes or anything, though.

It would be crazy if LP's could no longer be pressed, now that they've become popular again. Would that all just be done in countries that didn't care as much about worker health? Or are there viable non-vinyl substitutes for LP's?

it's toxic in use as well. AFAIK they are still contaminated with lead and cadmium in the US, which Europe has removed. There's lots of phthalates that leach out. Definitely not something you would want to drink water out of- which is why its used for drainage. The drainage chemicals are someone else's problem!

PEX everything!

Does PEX last 100 years even in full sun? PVC does.

PVC most definitely does not. It is definitely UV susceptible.

Edit to include reference: "Manufacturers suggest a thin coat of a latex based paint to protect pipe from discoloration and any other adverse effects that may occur. Choose a white or light colored paint and cover any areas that will be outdoors. This will shield that outer layer of plastic and keep your pipes functioning well for years." https://www.commercial-industrial-supply.com/resource-center...

Use CPVC instead of PVC with UV exposure.

Vinyl doesn’t last a year in full sun. If you can put up protectants in vinyl I’m sure you can put them in PEX or HDPE.

Uh, unless it gets UV exposure, then it's PEX nothing.

Even better, pex-al-pex everything

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