Again Plastics News has seen fit to give a platform to an ardent foe of plastics and PVC in particular. I refer to the Aug. 14 Mailbag letter by David Wallinga of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy attacking PVC. Once again you give these Luddites a voice in a publication supposed to be dedicated to the plastics industry. Do I detect a hidden agenda here? It's maybe a newspaper for the acceptable plastics industry, and perhaps PVC doesn't qualify.
IATP definitely has an agenda. It is to criticize industrial agriculture in general and food technology in particular. They were founded in 1986 with funds from the Unitarian Church's Veatch Foundation, run then by a former Greenpeace director. See any connection here? Push nontechnical processes. No chemicals allowed. No genetic engineering. No ... plastics unless made by corn conversion. Plants are good. Chemicals are bad.
I suggest you research who these anti-everything people are before publishing their letters, and at least identify them for your readers.
By the way, one of their studies purports to show how environmentally caused childhood diseases cost Minnesota $1.5 billion a year. The population of Minnesota is only 5 million souls, so this is an astounding figure ... and totally unbelievable, unless they count the common cold as an environmentally caused disease. It does get cold in Minnesota.
John P. Dellevigne
HPG International Inc.
Somerset, N.J.