De-vinyl Institute of Toronto (DIT) presents:

{ a PVC-free Zone {

Clean Production Information Page  

Blue Vinyl North

Crackers the Corporate- Crime-fighting Chicken
	Watch the Award-winning documentary Blue Vinyl: A Toxic Comedy on CBC Newsworld’s The Passionate Eye!

BIG EVENTS and INFO:

§ Canadian Broadcast Premier of Blue Vinyl: March 30

§ Public Event: Clean Production for a Green Economy: Toward a PVC-free World: March 6

§ Public Appearances & Press Conference with Judith Helfand

§ Vital Links on PVC, Green Production and Eco-industry Initiatives

§ Contact Information

Television Event: Canadian Media Premiere of Blue Vinyl: A Toxic Comedy

on CBC Newsworld's The Passionate Eye, Sunday March 30, 10 pm & 1am EST

Many Torontonians have already been charmed by Blue Vinyl, a hit before packed houses at both the Hot Docs and Planet in Focus film festivals here last year.  After its success, however, at a number of other prestigious festivals—including the Sundance festival, the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, the Bermuda International festival, and the Santa Cruz International festival—a wider audience is waiting to see its Canadian media premiere. 

            The film is unique in combining humour with serious and complex environmental and social concerns.  While the style of co-producer Judith Helfand—who made the film with Daniel Gold (see picture)—has been compared to that of Michael Moore, the complexities of “the PVC issue” dwarf the obvious social irrationalities that Moore targets.  Many of us are aware that there is something fundamentally wrong—and downright unhealthy—about the centrality of synthetic chemicals in the modern economy.  But renouncing the whole of modern development doesn’t seem to be the answer, and the more specific workings of the industrial economy have been carefully veiled from our observation.    Even in the environmental movement, toxics campaigners have only in the last decade begun to get a handle on the really central economic-technical relationships between chemicals and capitalism.  Meanwhile pioneers in green building and industrial ecology have become increasingly clear about the practical alternatives to brown industry and toxic materials.

            Blue Vinyl is a cinematic tour-de-force of the spectrum of social, environmental, health and economic problems engendered by the single most destructive industrial material, polyvinyl chloride.  It also goes a fair distance—though perhaps not all the way—to surveying the alternatives to PVC.   The film is the story of co-director Judith’s quest to educate herself and her parents about the implications of putting PVC siding on their suburban Long Island house.  The journey takes them to the toxic Gulf shores of “cancer alley” in Louisiana, where a third of North America’s PVC is produced; to hallowed university halls to tap the knowledge of scientists and  toxicologists; and to Venice Italy, where the ravages of PVC production have killed hundreds of vinyl workers.   In following the lifecycle of PVC from production, through use and then disposal, the film weaves in wonderful animation to illustrate complex technological relationships in an easily understandable way.  While deconstructing the existing economy, Judith makes the rounds of green builders and environmentalists to discover other more positive options for her parents’ house.  In the process, we become aware of a whole range of other social, cultural and technological dimensions, from middle-class conformity, to environmental racism, to our techno-illiteracy, to the quality of worklife, to the power of community and citizen activism, and even to the importance of family.  Blue Vinyl seems to be developing as much of a following at Jewish Film Festivals around the continent as at environmental ones.

            One of the most impressive things about Blue Vinyl is the selfless work of the producers to use its screenings to support the often-thankless work of local activists: in women’s health, workplace health & safety, green building, environmental toxics, and community economic development.   The filmmakers have an excellent website, replete with a Toolkit full of clear educational materials that people can download for free.

 Blue Vinyl’s work has been a great complement to that of the Healthy Building Network which is coordinating the campaign against PVC in the US.  Although it now encompasses a broad network of groups, the HBN was spawned by David Morris’s Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), and was probably the single most important force in the campaign against CCA-pressure treated wood in the US.   Not incidentally, one of the ILSR’s other initiatives is the Carbohydrate Economy Project, which has done pioneering work in the development of plant-based alternatives to petrochemicals.

links for Blue Vinyl:

· My House Is Your House

· The Passionate Eye

· Review:  Alternet.org

· Review: World / Independent Film

· Interview with Judith and Daniel

· A Healthy Baby Girl (previous movie by Judith)

Toronto Public Forum, March 6:

Clean Production for a Green Economy: Toward a PVC-free World Thursday March 6, 2003,  7-10 pm OISE Auditorium, 252 Bloor St. W.

Bev Thorpe

featuring     Beverley Thorpe, of Clean Production Action 

Rich Whayte, Toronto Environmental Alliance

Nick De Carlo, Canadian Auto Workers

Dorothy Golden-Rosenberg, Womens Healthy Environments Network

                                         co-sponsored by:

Labour Council Environmental Forum

Transformative Learning Centre, OISE/UT

Ontario Workers Health & Safety Centre

Women's Healthy Environments Network (WHEN)

Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA)

Ontario Federation of Labour

Coalition for a Green Economy

Clean Production Action  

Great Lakes United

Grassroots Environmental Products

Labour Caucus of the Ontario Environment Network

Waste Caucus of the O.E.N.

Beverley Thorpe is the founder of Clean Production Action, a network of consultants specializing in Clean Production implementation strategies.  For a decade she was toxics coordinator for Greenpeace International in Europe and now lives in Montreal.  She is the author of the Citizen’s Guide to Clean Production.  Beverley will have just returned from Europe, and will be able to brief everyone on new issues in the struggle for PVC alternatives and progress of the movement in Europe.

ATTENTION: here is Beverley’s Powerpoint presentation from this event. 

Public Appearances:

Blue Vinyl’s Judith Helfand Comes to Toronto

To help the local movement for alternatives to PVC and make the most of the CBC Passionate Eye premiere of Blue Vinyl, co-director and protagonist Judith Helfand will be making a rare public appearance in Toronto.  She will talk about the film and about the growing movement in the US.

Women Make Movies: About Judith Helfand

Main Event and Uncut Blue Vinyl Screening!

Reclaiming our Work and our Health:

Blue Vinyl and the Growing Movement for a Nontoxic World

Wednesday, March 26, 2003, 7 pm

Ontario Federation of Labour, 15 Gervais Drive (Don Mills & Eglinton)

Judith will be joined by Rich Whate of the Toronto Environmental Alliance and labour movement activists for a screening of Blue Vinyl. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear Judith talk about the making of the film and about strategies of community and workplace action.

This will be the major public event of Judith’s visit to Toronto, but it also serves as the culmination of a day-long symposium on occupational disease organized by the Workers Health and Safety Centre and the Ontario Federation of Labour. Workers from around the province will be joined by environmentalists and the general public for this spirited evening which includes a full screening of the film Blue Vinyl.

…for more information on the Occupational Disease Symposium, see

http://www.ofl-fto.on.ca/conferences/index.htm

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Detoxifying the Economy and the Body Politic

sponsored by the Labour & Waste Caucuses of the Ontario Environment Network
Judith—with Jim Mahon (Labour Caucus, OEN)

at the Toronto Social Forum

Sunday March 30, 10:00 to 11: 30 am
Ryerson University

This special Sunday morning workshop of the Toronto Social Forum provides an opportunity for activists to talk about the form and the content of a possible non-toxic economy. Jim Mahon of the OEN’s Labour Caucus will discuss labour strategies to implement “extended producer responsibility’, particularly as EPR relates to toxic chemicals. Judith will discuss her personal experience of using the Blue Vinyl film to support community- and workplace- based struggles against toxic chemicals.

Note: this event is accessible only through the Toronto Social Forum, which runs from Friday through Sunday. Standard full-event admission is $40; for Sunday only, $20. Check out all the other exciting workshops available for these bargain rates.

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Press / Media Interviews with Judith Helfand

Thursday March 27, all day long

Reporters: phone Loretta at (416) 441-1939 x-2009

or Brian at (416) 968-1282

for an appointment

PVC Alert:

Background Information on the "Watergate of chemicals",

the core chemical of the petrochemical industry

§ Environmental Impacts of Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) Building Materials, Joe Thornton, Ph.D.

§ “Alternatives to PVC: An Economic Analysis”, paper delivered to US Green Building Conference, Austin Texas, November 14, 2002, by Frank Ackerman, Tufts University

§ “New Studies Raise Concerns about PVC Additive Commonly Found in Vinyl Building Products”, Healthy Building Network newsletter

§ The Poison Plastic, Greenpeace International website

§ PVC-free Solutions, Greenpeace International website

§ The Life-cycle of PVC, My House is Your House (Blue Vinyl) website

§ Cost-effective ways to a Dioxin-free Great Lakes (1996), by Barry Commoner and the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems

§ The Burning Question: Chlorine and Dioxin (1997), Greenpeace report by Pat Cosner

§ “How Incinerators Produce Dioxin”, Rachel’s Health & Environment Weekly

§ “Does Plastic Have a Role in a Sustainable Society?”, address by Irish MEP Patricia McKenna to Plastics Industry Association conference, 1998

§ PVC Plastic—an “Environmental Poison”, and why some governments and industry are phasing it out, Powerpoint presentation by Beverley Thorpe of Clean Production Action, Toronto, March 6, 2003

Other Important Articles on Green Production:

Ø Bill McDonough & Michael Braungart, “The Next Industrial Revolution”, in Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1998

Ø Walter Stahel, “From Products to Services: Selling performance instead of goods”, ITPS Report, No. 37

Ø Hardin Tibbs, “Industrial Ecology: An Environmental Agenda for Industry”, Whole Earth Review and Global Business Network, 1993

Ø John E. Young, “The Coming Materials Efficiency Revolution”, Part I of Extended Producer Responsibility: A Materials Policy for the 21^st Century, by Bette Fishbein (INFORM), John Ehrenfeld (MIT), and John Young (Materials Efficiency Project), Inform: 2000.

       Organizations doing cutting-edge work:

§ Clean Production Action § Canadian Eco-Industrial Network § Zero Emissions Research Institute § Lowell Center for Sustainable Production § U. of Tennessee Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies § Product Life Institute, Geneva § Centre for Sustainable Design § Healthy Building Network § ILSR Carbohydrate Economy Clearinghouse § Citizens Environmental Coalition, New York § Crackers the Corporate Crime Chicken For Local Groups, See Co-sponsors of March 6 event (above)

Contact Information:

for more information on Toronto events and activities: Linda Sepp: bluevinyltoronto@hotmail.com Brian Milani: bmilani@web.ca Loretta Michaud: loretta.michaud@rogers.com for more information on Blue Vinyl, contact the directors at: info@bluevinyl.org

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