Myths and truth about PVC windows: is plastic as terrible as "environmentalists" scare?

PVC windows are not accused of anything, and they are toxic, and sealed, and do not decompose. Is everything so sad, or is the "elephant" inflated from the next "fly"?

Despite the fact that the use of PVC profile windows has become widespread practice for a long time (only in us in the country at least 20 years ago) discussions about their environmental safety have not ceased to this day.

Unsubstantiated arguments and "authoritative" opinions about the poor environmental friendliness of plastic windows already look ridiculous and ridiculous, but the "experts" still catch fear on those who are faced with a choice. It is enough to take any topic on the portal devoted not just to the choice of windows: wood or plastic, but to the choice of a specific manufacturer PVC products, a commentator will immediately appear who will ask thoughtfully and competently: “Why do you need plastic?". And then, according to tradition, there are excerpts from pseudoscientific articles under the general title "What do the sellers of plastic windows hide from us?" or "The Whole Truth About PVC Windows".

Let's take another look at this topic in detail in order to understand whether it is really worth fearing PVC products, find out the whole truth and find out if the sellers are hiding something from us. In this article, we will refer to the experience of world leaders in the development and production of window and door systems from high-quality plastic, and to the experience of the participants of our portal. For a comprehensive study of the issue, we will consider the problem from three points of view: from the point of view of organic chemistry, from the point of view of the ecology of the home and from the point of view of the ecology of the entire planet.

Point of view # 1 Plastic windows are dangerous chemicals

Perhaps the first and most important thing for which plastic windows are scolded is for their artificial origin. They say that PVC windows are chemistry and they release toxic substances into the surrounding air. At the same time, the reasoning is quite philistine, at the level "and I read somewhere that lead is added to the windows and it is harmful to health."

PVC - polyvinyl chloride, is really a complex synthetic polymer, which includes various chemical substances that are in a stable compound and do not emit any harmful substances into the environment under normal operating conditions substances. In simple terms, PVC windows do not glow.

Today, to confirm the safety of both the material itself and their production, no certification is even required either in our country or abroad. That is, at the level of state regulatory bodies, plastic windows are officially recognized as safe. We will not affirm for the whole world, but it is difficult to blame our state for not wanting to replenish the budget at the expense of various fees. There are more agencies that collect money for various approvals, environmental certificates, laboratory tests and other monitoring of pollution than anywhere else. Therefore, the absence of mandatory certification is a clear indicator that the products are really safe.

Today, plastic windows are installed everywhere, not only in residential buildings, offices and industrial premises, but also where health care is fundamental. factor - these are schools, kindergartens, hospitals, and even in intensive care and resuscitation wards, where the highest requirements for air quality are present, PVC windows.

When normal operating conditions are gone, critics come up with a new argument - fire.

Yrtim

FORUMHOUSE user

In case of fire, wooden window blocks are safer than plastic ones. The wood burns slowly (charring rate ≈ 0.5 mm / min) without poisonous gases. Polyvinyl chloride already at a temperature of 140 ° C emits gases hazardous to humans, including dioxin. Renovation of buildings with plastic windows after a fire requires significant costs to eliminate the effects of pollution.

In this statement, almost everything is true, except that the emphasis is shifted. The fact is that polyvinyl chloride is a hardly flammable thermoplastic, the release of harmful substances from which begins occur at temperatures well above 150 ° C, in other words, at the temperature that is fatal in itself person. And if it came to a fire, when everything is on fire, then plastic windows are unlikely to worsen the "comfort". At the same time, modern wooden frames also contain a good amount of chemical compounds such as impregnations, paints, glue, etc.

sed94

FORUMHOUSE user

Any thing is "chemistry". Anyway, our whole life consists only of chemical reactions. And as for the windows... Can you imagine how a wooden window should be processed so that it will serve faithfully for 50 years, and then “environmentally” rotted away? Or would you order to replace the rickety wooden frames every 5 years? Or is it not worth changing them - will we heat the street?

Point of view No. 2 Plastic windows - poor microclimate in the house

Speaking about the negative impact of plastic windows on the ecology of the home, the authors of this critical concepts usually mean not so much toxic substances as the tightness of window PVC constructions. In other words, the consumer characteristic of the product is taken, which is clearly its advantage and is simply turned upside down.

Quote from the site "Ecology of Life"

The ventilation system in many houses and apartments leaves much to be desired, installing plastic windows for this, we we create an unhealthy atmosphere in the room where harmful substances emitted by objects in home. Humidity also rises sharply, and as a result, favorable conditions are created for the development of fungus and mold. All this together leads to health problems, especially with the respiratory system.

As the saying goes: "check and checkmate". It turns out that the bad microclimate is not to blame for poor ventilation, which is a matter of course, but a hermetically closed circuit that does not allow to penetrate into the living space, street noise, exhaust gases, industrial emissions and other environmental pollutants, of which there are much more than from the inside.

Breathing closed window proponents definitely ignore or deliberately ignore the fact that modern wooden windows also lack the ability to breathe, since during the production process, the wood in them goes through several stages of processing with various paints and varnishes, so that all the pores are sealed. And to use unpainted woodwork, which could provide a certain minimum air exchange, in a modern housing is not only unreasonable: the tree swells, dries up, fades and just rots, but it is also very strange, because bad manners.

Point of view No. 3 The problem of global ecology

If the previous two points of view came from people who mainly care about their conditional 33 square meter, and everything outside the window is no longer important, then the following problem really takes place in the global scale.

The fact is that PVC windows, like any other man-made items, have their own service life, constituting in this case approximately 50 years, after the onset of which, the window must be disposed of. But what about this situation? After all, plastic does not decompose, and it cannot be disposed of by incineration.

In the 90s of the last century, in Europe, the service life of the first PVC windows began to come to an end, and environmentalists scored alarm, demanding either to solve the problem with recycling in the "green key", or immediately restrict the release of products from plastic. By that time, technologies for processing various types of household waste were actively developing in developed countries, however, a plastic window is a multicomponent product consisting of glass, PVC profile, metal reinforcement and rubber seals and it turned out to solve the problem of its complex processing not so easy.

An elegant solution was proposed by one of the manufacturing companies, which has developed its own technology for deep processing of used plastic windows.

At the initial stage, the window is freed from the glass unit, which is recycled in accordance with the glass recycling technology. Then the PVC frame is fed to a shredder - a huge shredder that grinds it into small pieces. Further, the crumb is washed and sorted: the metal is extracted by a powerful magnet, and light fragments of the rubber seal and lamination are sieved on special sieves.

A peculiar problem is to decompose the resulting raw material into an exclusively white material and a material containing various inclusions. Here, responsible growers use the technology used to sort coffee beans of different roast grades. As a result, plastic crumbs are separated by color and sent to granulation.
The obtained reclaimed granulate is the initial raw material for the production of new PVC profiles with the same basic physical and technical parameters as the new plastic. As a result of such processing, no more than 2% of waste is generated, sent for utilization, the remaining 98% get a new life.

Today in Europe there are three such factories, which cover the problem of recycling used PVC windows in full. There are no such factories in Russia yet, but the time has not yet come for this, because the domestic window industry is not much more than 20 years old. In any case, this technology has been tested and can be easily replicated in our country when the need arises.

conclusions

Plastic windows are absolutely safe from the point of view of ecology, they are reliable, durable and stable, and if you really care about your health, then installing PVC windows is the right decision. The main thing is to choose a manufacturer whose quality you can trust. For a more detailed study of the topic, we invite you to the relevant section our forum, where various types of window structures are discussed, the rules for their installation and useful life hacks.

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