Sprol

This chlorine factory in Maryland is considered of the 50 most dangerous chemical factories in the United States, largely because of the amount of hazardous materials it stores. It can produce almost two million pounds of chlorine in a single production run. What will become of all this chlorine?

The largest industrial use for chlorine in the world is the production of synthetic materials, specifically polyvinyl choride. Commonly known as “PVC” or “vinyl”, this stuff is used for almost everything, and between 30 and 40 percent of the global production of chlorine goes into its manufacture. In fact, over ten billion pounds of PVC resins were produced in the United States in 1992. The only plastic that we make more of is polyethylene.

First produced in a laboratory in 1872, PVC is the most used plastic for construction. It’s used for piping, flooring, paneling, siding, windows, gutters, lighting, wire and cable, etc. The fact that PVC resin is 57% chlorine (by weight) has a lot to do with the potential hazard people face when exposed.

Vinyl chloride, which is polymerized into PVC when it is manufactured, was found to cause a very rare liver cancer, angiosarcoma, in PVC workers. In response to this OSHA set very strict limits for workplace exposure. Manufacture which previously had occured in open vats had to be redesigned and retooled to trap these poisonous fumes.

Did it work? In 1988 Dr. Kenneth Rosenman of Michegan State University published a study that found a correlation between central-nervous birth defects exposure to ambient levels of vinyl chloride in communities adjacent to PVC factories. In other words, living around PVC factories causes birth defects. This is with all of the OSHA regulations in place.

The biggest problem with PVC, especially when used as a construction material, is that it gives off certain dioxins when it burns, in addition to gaseous hydrochloric acid. In fact, PVC gives off toxic gases before it starts burning through a process called decomposition. For example, insulated wires often overheat for long periods of time before failure, causing plasticizers such as DOP to give off harmful fumes like phthalate anhydide. From greens.org:

Dioxin and similar complex organochlorines are among the unwanted, but unavoidable by-products that are created throughout the industrial chlorine cycle. These chemical contaminants occur during the manufacture of elemental chlorine. They are created when chlorine is used to make chlorinated chemicals, bleached pulp, PVC plastic, etc. They are formed when the wastes from these processes and discarded products are burned in incinerators, cement kilns and industrial boilers and furnaces. And they are formed when the products are burned intentionally (such as gasoline additives) or accidentally (as in building fires).

Chlorine is an essential component of dioxin. Without chlorine, there is no dioxin. In other words, dioxin cannot be created when chlorine-free chemicals are made by and used in chlorine-free processes. read more

Prior to the development of the global chlorine industry, the dioxin level measured in ancient tissues was over one hundred times less than the background dioxin found in modern human tissue.