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Dear Nathan
 
There was a touch of self-congratulation in recent reports that the industry is on course to meet its obligation to stop using lead in pvcu. The obligation refers to the Vinyl 2010 voluntary agreement to a 50% reduction in lead by 2010 and a complete phase out by 2015.
 
But is clapping premature? Systems companies that could easily change have done so. A number tried to go lead-free, couldn’t get it right, and had to switch back to lead. The deadline may seem far off, but the difficulties they experienced do not appear to have been resolved. It costs money to change, especially if new tooling or retuned tooling is required to work with lead-free materials. So their fabricators are forced to compete, selling non-green products to homeowners who want to go green.
 
Assuming these systems companies do start to deliver lead-free profile what then? There is a lot of stock in fabricators’ factories. Will they collect all the leaded profile from their customers and replace it like-for-like with lead free? If not, how will fabricators track it and keep the two materials reliably apart – in manufacture and recycling? The stock-turn on main profiles is fast, and the lead-free material should flush through in a few weeks. But many profiles sit there for months, even years before they need reordering. So, change will require careful management throughout the supply chain. What about add-ons, and projects where product is delivered over a period of time? Will guarantees be affected? And will BBA and BSI certification cover both materials or a mix of materials in a window or one order? These aren’t problems for Liniar because we started with lead free material from the outset.
 
We have asked the BBA and BSI for guidance, as no doubt all systems companies are doing, and hope to get an answer soon. But for such a big issue it is remarkable that there has been virtually no mention of it in the trade press or the professional bodies that represent our industry.
 
Have fabricators been informed or consulted? I don’t believe so. But given the approaching deadlines, the time required for a change over and the potential scale of disruption for fabricators if it goes wrong perhaps we should start to talk about it?
 
Yours sincerely
 
Roger Hartshorn
Managing Director
HL Plastics