Postcards featuring the photographs taken by Time Magazine and filled out by East Palestine residents expressing their feelings a year after last year’s NorfolK Southern train derailment hang in the hallway at the East Palestine Memorial Library and outside the room where a screening of “Blue Vinyl” was held Saturday. Photo by Stephanie Elverd

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Environmental groups and the East Palestine Memorial Library teamed up Saturday to hold a screening of a documentary that takes a critical look at plastic production and the ramifications of that industry.

Moms Clean Air Force along with Food & Water Watch, Clean Air Council, People Over Petro, Three Rivers Waterkeepers, Beyond Plastics, and Clean Air Action presented “Blue Vinyl.”

The film follows the five-year journey of Judith Helfand to find out the backstory on vinyl after her parents’ decision to replace the wood siding on her childhood with vinyl.

The documentary follows Hefland across the United States and to Europe, featuring the people that she meets and highlights stories of cancer and respiratory ailments linked to PVC manufacturing and exposure to vinyl chloride — the VC in PVC.

The film explores the large number of diagnoses of Angiosarcoma (a rare type of cancer that forms in the lining of the blood vessels and lymph vessels) in Lake Charles, Louisiana where several petrochemical plants produce the country’s largest concentrations of vinyl chloride. It also explores the exceedingly high mortality rate of vinyl chloride exposed workers in the Montedison-Enichem plant located in Venice. The documentary focuses on the dangerous production of PVC and the dangers and difficulties of disposing of it — often requiring incineration at toxic waste facilities.

“The industry just keeps trying to kind of convince us that it’s okay to continue to make all of this plastic,” said Rachel Meyer, a Beaver County resident and Ohio River Valley coordinator of Moms Clean Air Force. “That it can be recycled or we can use chemical recycling, which really and unfortunately are not at all solutions. The recycling is not happening. We have learned that less than 8% of plastics actually get recycled, and the chemical recycling creates a whole lot of pollution in itself.”

The screening was held to celebrate Earth Day 2024’s theme “Planet vs. Plastics” and to continue to shine a light on the dangers associated with vinyl chloride. That light as grown stronger in the last year following the Norfolk Southern train derailment which damaged and ultimately led to the intentional release of five tank cars of vinyl chloride — totaling 1.1 million pounds — over the village and the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to evaluate vinyl chloride as one of five additional toxic chemicals for risk evaluation. The agency already classifies vinyl chloride as a Group A, human carcinogen.

While the film follows the lifetime of plastics from “birth to its death,” it did not focus on the transportation dangers of vinyl chloride. Meyer did, explaining that the chemical is transported from OxyVinyls (the company that owned the VC on the East Palestine derailed train) in Harris County, Texas to Orbia PVC plastics factories in Paulsboro, New Jersey. Coincidentally, Paulsboro also experienced a derailment and the leak of about 23,000 gallons of the Vinyl Chloride into the environment in 2012. Over 10 years later, residents in that town roughly the same size as East Palestine still claim they are suffering health symptoms that mirror the ones reported in and around East Palestine.

“Transportation wasn’t touched on in the film but transportation is a problem,” Meyer said. “Here are some facts about how much vinyl chloride specifically goes on the rail cars. At any given moment 36 million pounds 3 of vinyl chloride on more than 200 rail cars across the U.S.” Meyers said. So where OxyVinyls the tracks that go there to New Jersey to be made into PVC within a mile of train tracks – a half mile on either side — there are three million people around that route and 1,000 schools.”