Blue Vinyl

GPoMC movie night this month featured the film Blue Vinyl.

The filmmaker, Judith Helfand, takes the audience along with her as she discovers the true cost of the blue vinyl siding that her father has just had placed on the side of her parents house. From production to end-of-life the blue vinyl siding has left a sad trail of death and environmental destruction, Judith’s witty investigative approach keeps us laughing and fuming at the same time. We were especially drawn to Judith because she would fit in so well with the Greens and many of the scenes in the film were very familiar to our own experiences in discovering the depth of the evil that lies within the corporate machine and dealing with how to change the world. My favorite moment in the film was when Judith was sitting at the dinning room table with her parents after 3 years of investigation and 3 years with obsessing over the damage the blue vinyl siding has caused Judith’s parents both tell her they would still put up the vinyl siding knowing what they have learned, because it’s cheap and doesn’t rot like wood.

Find out what you can do.

On a local note, Blue Vinyl was the recipient of the 2002 Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary at the High Falls Films Festival.

Great quotes from the movie:
[Later I asked my dad, "If you had known that over the course of its lifecycle, from the factory to the incinerator, vinyl produces a wide array of deadly pollutants that threaten our future with a global toxic crisis, would you still have put it on the house?" "I hope not, honey," he said. "But they didn't write that on the box.]
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[Sure Greenpeace is biased towards saving the earth and it’s in habitants, but I had no problem with that]