Luxury Vinyl Flooring is A Sin: Or any thing that Vinyl touches is never the same again
Are there TV shows you watch for no apparent good reason? I have an inexplicable affection for home repair shows. The advent of streaming services brought Welcome Home, based in Waco TX, to my screen (until I realized how homophobic and scarily right wing the show’s owners are) and then a whole raft of HGTV based programming featuring builders and renovators in Chicago, Indianapolis, Southern California, Atlanta, Mississippi. Some repairing homes, most flipping homes on a range from seeking giant profits to alleged commitments to “revitalize” their communities (and to make a little money, until they were making a lot of money and gentrifying neighborhoods in the process… but that’s another story).
Iespecially love the renovations where they make every effort to renew and repair existing wood floors. One or two shows still do that but now many sell the future or current homeowner on luxury vinyl plank (LVP) flooring. It can look “realistically” like anything — wood, ceramic tile, cement — and I am souring on these shows for that choice.
I bet many of you, outside of the environmental justice activist community that I know and love, never given much thought to vinyl chloride before the train derailment in East Palestine Ohio and the maddening and dangerous choices Norfolk Southern, the state and local officials have been making in the cleanup. Vinyl Chloride based products are all around us and its manufacture has been destroying communities — most Black, Brown, Indigenous or rural poor white people since its wholesale manufacture began in the early 20th century.
I am referring to Vinyl Chloride monomer, the base chemical to PVC. Polyvinyl chloride is the “stable” chemical that makes up much of our living spaces, it is in our plumbing, windows and doors, power systems, computers, wires and cables, siding and cladding on buildings, roofing, ceiling systems, the membranes that keep moisture out of new construction, waste management systems, a whole world of other objects we use, eat from, bathe in and generally touch, and now “luxury” flooring.
LVP flooring and many other plastics-based objects are a consequence of a predacious petrocapitalism that seeks every opportunity to expand and infect our economy, lives and communities. The industries that comprise the petrocapitalist enterprise — oil, gas and petrochemical processing — leave devastation, displacement and death in their wake. Communities throughout the South (and increasingly in all parts of the country) have been sacrificed to poorly enforced environmental regulations, forced to prove their injuries, and the damage to their land, water and air, and displaced in the expansion of those deadly companies through the encouragement of state governments. An example I have written about is Mossville Louisiana, founded by free and escaped formerly enslaved Black people in the mid 19th century, and essentially given to SASOL, the South African apartheid era synthetic oil company that used Nazi era technology to avoid the embargoes of the apartheid era.
The people of Mossville had spent years holding local, state and Federal officials accountable for the devastation to their land, water, and bodies caused by the exposures from the over dozen oil, gas, and chemical processing plants on the border of their town — one of their streets was named for the major product produced in the adjacent industrial zone — VCM Plant Road.
Vinyl chloride monomer, the chemical now soaking into the soil and stream beds around East Palestine destroyed the wells in the eastern one-third of Mossville, a neighborhood called Belair.
The difference between Mossville and East Palestine is that Mossville and so many other communities — in Louisiana’s cancer alley and throughout the US — Flint Michigan, Beaumont Texas, Jefferson City Missouri, Barberton Ohio (71 miles from East Palestine), have been knowing sacrificed to the interests and whims of petrocapitalists and extractive industries in general. East Palestine, even with all the media coverage and nonsense about how white people are being hurt in some exceptional way by the spill, is right to fear they will be next.
