PVCs and LEED Certification

From my Greenclips mailing list, I found out that the U.S. Green Building Council’s Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee (TSAC) has released for public comment a draft of its long-awaited report on polyvinyl chloride (PVC). A more detailed summary of this report can be found here. The TSAC’s PVC web site is here. The report was commissioned to determine “the availability and quality of the evidence as a basis for a reasoned decision about the inclusion of a PVC-related credit in the LEED Rating System”. The report’s central finding is that “the available evidence does not support a conclusion that PVC is consistently worse than alternative materials on a life-cycle environmental and health basis.” The report also discusses data gaps and subject areas which, “if information became available, could alter the results of the analysis.” The “PVC-related credit” would provide a credit towards LEED certification of a building that does not use PVC materials.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification identifies building projects that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability by meeting specified performance standards. LEED certification establishes recognition in the green building sector, contributes to a growing green building knowledge base, and qualifies projects for a growing array of state and local government incentives.

PVC and comparable building materials were analyzed using lifecycle analysis (LCA) coupled with health risk assessment. The Task Group also created a database of nearly 2,500 relevant reports, papers, and other source materials, many submitted by various stakeholders, to assess the “availability and quality of the evidence”. In addition to the conclusion that a PVC-related credit was not appropriate in LEED rating, the report also stated that credits should be based on life-cycle impact categories rather than specific material types (a weakness of LEED certification that I have heard about elsewhere).

Some might view the USGBC report as a clean bill of health for PVC (I can see the wingnuttery now, if they bothered to pay attention to such things). While they clearly came to a different conclusion than CHEJ regarding PVC, the USGBC report says only that PVC was not a worse performer environmentally compared with other building materials. CHEJ looked at a wider range of uses for PVC, such as packaging, which has a different product lifecycle. USGBC’s methodology clearly was more robust, though. It would be interesting to see how PVC would fare when all of its uses were analyzed using LCA/risk assessment.

It should be noted that the report states, “occupational cancer risks are far from negligible in relation to health risks to the general population, and should be considered more widely as part of comprehensive life-cycle methodologies”. It is the mark of a good risk assessment to note this finding, because it identifies the concern that the risks associated with PVC (and other building materials for that matter) are borne disproportionately by workers. As CHEJ also notes, poor communities also pay the risk price for our consumer choices. Whether we’re buying PVC siding or head lettuce, it’s something we pay scant attention to.