In an interview with the Healthy Building Network, Judith Helfand and Dan Gold, co-directors of the award-winning documentary Blue Vinyl, an expose of the vinyl industry, issued their first rebuttal to the malicious charges levied against the film by the Vinyl Institute, the trade association representing vinyl or PVC manufacturers. Brushing aside the Institute’s renewed attack on the film, Helfand said “the case against vinyl is stronger in the DVD.” (To read the full interview, go to http://www.healthybuilding.net/news/bluevinyl-060205.html)

In a May 16 press release, the Vinyl Institute charged Helfand and Gold with changing the story in the DVD from the original HBO broadcast. Specifically, the Vinyl Institute criticized the makers of Blue Vinyl for cutting a scene with a former PVC fabricator, Lori Sanzone, who claimed she had angiosarcoma of the liver, a cancer uniquely associated with exposure to vinyl chloride, the key building block of PVC plastic, when she didn’t. But she and her doctors didn’t know this at the time of the film’s broadcast.

Helfand and Gold had vetted her diagnosis with independent physicians before including her in the film, and removed Sanzone from the DVD after they learned that her doctors changed her diagnosis. It is odd that the Vinyl Institute criticizes the filmmakers for this responsible act.

“The movie’s premise is actually strengthened in the DVD edition because in taking Lori out of that scene, we ended up increasing screen time for the Columbia University researcher whose study challenges one of the main defenses of vinyl,” said Gold. The Vinyl Institute maintains that only workers who actually made the PVC before 1974 were harmed by exposure to vinyl chloride above current legal exposure limits. Dr. Paul Brandt-Rauf’s clinical evidence raises new questions about vinyl chloride exposure, leading him to state “there is no safe level.”

Helfand and Gold told Healthy Building News that the movie’s premise has been strengthened by the additions to the DVD that document the growing movement to transform the vinyl industry. Special features include footage of Habitat for Humanity’s virtual PVC-free home, built in New Orleans last spring, and a “Consumer Revolution” feature, documenting the ways that Blue Vinyl has already had an impact in the movement to eliminate PVC.

Blue Vinyl won the Excellence in Cinematography Award at Sundance in 2002 and was shown in a high-profile national broadcast of the HBO series America Undercover. To support the goal of transforming the PVC industry away from a source of environmental and human harm, a consumer advocacy and education campaign, www.MyHouseIsYour House.org, was launched following the May 2002 HBO broadcast