Vinyl makers push for New Urbanism market

Industry campaign boasts improved color and variety, but critics link vinyl to dioxin and environmental harm.

In the past ten months, the Vinyl Siding Institute has co-sponsored a Seaside Institute program in Atlanta, a SmartCode seminar in Miami, and a tour during CNU’s annual convention in Philadelphia.
The Institute — VSI for short — has run full-page advertising in Planning magazine asserting that “New urbanism needs the versatility of today’s vinyl siding.” To get this message across, the Institute this winter produced a publication called “Designing Style,” which aims to persuade builders and designers of traditional houses to use vinyl on their exteriors.
The publication, offering advice on how to use vinyl on houses in nine historical styles, from Craftsman to Cape Cod to Queen Anne, was put together after consultation with a few new urbanist designers, including Kenny Craft and Mark Bombaugh.
At CNU XVI April 3-6 in Austin, Texas, the Institute will again have a presence. In light of this concerted effort, New Urban News set out to examine what’s new in vinyl siding and to investigate the material’s pros and cons — from aesthetics to its impact on the environment and human health.

Aesthetic considerations
Color: Probably the most notable advance made by vinyl manufacturers is the expanding range of colors. Vinyl siding used to come in pastels and neutral tones — what some called “twenty shades of beige.” Now it is also produced, at a higher price, in deeper and darker colors, such as hunter green, deep blue, and barn red.
Torti Gallas and Partners, a new urbanist architecture and planning firm in Silver Spring, Maryland, has had extensive experience with vinyl siding, employing it in developments where budgets are tight — particularly military housing and HOPE VI projects. Bombaugh, a design principal at Torti Gallas, welcomes the darker or deeper hues, referring to them as “colors you would get in a painted neighborhood.”
The price difference is “not insignificant,” but the broadened color spectrum “is really important in making a nice neighborhood,” Bombaugh says. To complement a brick facade, Torti Gallas often clads the side walls in dark vinyl clapboard. As Torti Gallas sees it, the dark vinyl looks pleasing, whereas light-colored vinyl is at odds with brick’s sense of solidity. The firm also uses dark vinyl on entire house exteriors, including the front. At Torti Gallas, Bombaugh says, “We’ve insisted that one-third of the houses in our neighborhoods are dark premium colors.”
Granor Price Homes of Horsham, Pennsylvania, used dark vinyl clapboard more sparingly to improve the appearance of Lantern Hill, an 18.5-acre TND infill project in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In a complex of 117 attached and detached units, Granor Price used dark vinyl siding on seven detached houses — those in key locations, such as focal points at the ends of streets.
In past years, vinyl sometimes faded, Molly Kersten, a spokeswoman for VSI, acknowledges. That’s no longer so, she says. Changes in technology, reinforced by a certification program for manufacturers and installers, have, according to Kersten, “made it a non-issue.”
Profiles: Vinyl siding is being produced in more than one style of clapboard. At Lantern Hill, some of the houses have vinyl clapboards with beaded edges, for more of a shadow line and greater visual interest. Vinyl manufacturers also offer a Dutch Lap style of clapboard and vertically-installed vinyl siding.
Vinyl with rigid backing: For many people, a siding that gives when you press your hand against it will always feel insubstantial, reminiscent of the flimsy house that was blown down in the story of the Three Little Pigs. Manufacturers have ameliorated its unsatisfying touch — and increased the product’s energy-efficiency — by introducing vinyl siding with a hard insulated backing.
The rigid insulation backing “gives the vinyl siding more strength and stability,” Bombaugh notes. The backing delivers an extra 2 to 4 R value, says Matt Dobson of VSI. Torti Gallas designed a concept house with insulation-backed vinyl siding last year in Omaha as part of the Partnership for Advancement of Technology in Housing (PATH), a collaborative effort of HUD and the building industry intended to jump-start new technologies.
Shingles and trim: Manufacturers also produce shingles, shakes, battens, soffits, moldings, and other trim pieces. The shingles and trim make it possible for builders to produce more elaborate traditional designs such as Craftsman and Victorian styles — those in which a richness of shape or texture is expected. Vinyl manufacturers “are getting better and better” at producing trim pieces, according to Bombaugh. At Lantern Hill, some of the shingles were polypropylene, a plastic a bit different from vinyl (most of which is polyvinyl chloride).
Torti Gallas has avoided vinyl trim. Instead, Bombaugh says, the firm prefers to design a piece of painted wood trim for use at the windows. “We pad out the wood trim to have a slot for the vinyl,” he says. How the vinyl siding meets other elements of a house is crucial to its appearance. “The industry is changing,” Bombaugh says. “There’s a big push on trim: corner trim, window trim. They’re looking to better pieces.”

Installation challenges
The chief advantage of vinyl siding is its cost. R.S. Means estimated the installed cost of vinyl siding in 2007 as $166 per 100 square feet (see table on page 11). By comparison, fiber-cement siding cost $225, wood $255, stucco $320, brick $1,000, and stone $2,700.
In Fine Homebuilding in September 2002, Mike Guertin, a builder in Rhode Island, wrote, “Although vinyl’s installation is faster, making vinyl look good on a house is more challenging than wood or fiber cement.” He noted: “One of my goals when planning wood siding is to have the bottom edges of the clapboards line up with the tops and bottoms of windows and doors whenever possible. This alignment unites the exterior look of the building. Alignment is difficult with vinyl because the course exposure isn’t adjustable.”
Guertin said he minimizes that problem by starting to plan the vinyl course layout “before the foundation of the house is poured. … I plan foundation drops, those spots where the foundation steps up or down to keep pace with the grade, on increments to match the siding height. It’s easy to position the rough window openings so that the tops of windows match a siding course. The bottoms of windows are hit or miss unless I’m using custom-built vinyl windows and can specify window height.”

Resistance continues
Laurence Qamar, a Portland, Oregon, architect, went on the Lantern Hill tour sponsored by VSI during last year’s CNU convention. At the tour’s end, he told New Urban News, “I’m not comfortable with any of the materials I’ve seen. … This is better than anything I’ve seen before, but I can still tell there’s something plasticky about it, even without touching it. With wood, there’s some inconsistency to how the paint goes on it.”
Wood’s idiosyncrasies enrich its character. It’s difficult or impossible to give vinyl clapboards the same character — and some attempts at doing so just make matters worse. Christine Franck, a New York architect involved in an Institute for Classical Architecture & Classical America program to upgrade the quality of house design, does not use vinyl, but says, “If I did use it, I would absolutely steer clear of any of the wood grain looks. Always remember that if a real piece of wood siding turned up with a highly visible wood grain pattern, you’d send it back.”
“Generally though, I’d try to stay with a more durable, beautiful, and responsible product like Hardiboard or real wood,” Franck says. “My parents once had to replace all the vinyl siding on their house after a hail storm left it dented. Likewise, I have not used the PVC trim products out on the market (like Azek), but I would easily use these, as they are just as good as wood. Again though, no faux wood grain.”
Designers have to take extra care to make sure that vinyl pieces meet windows, doors, corners, and other elements of the house in a pleasing way. (For more on Torti Gallas’s techniques, see April 2007 New Urban News.)
“I have a friend who lives in what he, with deprecating humor, refers to as his ‘plastic palace,’ in King Farm, a well-known TND in the DC area,” says Milton Grenfell, a Washington architect. “When I pointed out that a four-foot piece of vinyl siding was missing up in a gable end, he shrugged and responded that a windstorm had ripped it off a year or so ago, and he hadn’t gotten around to fixing it … When your house resembles your daughter’s Barbie Dreamhouse, it’s hard to take it seriously enough to care for it.”
Stephen Mouzon of the New Urban Guild argues that the look of vinyl and its promise of “low maintenance” do not foster a healthy attitude toward houses and other buildings — which ought to last for generations and deserve loving attention.
Kenny Craft, who has served as town architect for the South Main development in Colorado, sees VSI’s “Designing Style” as a sign that the industry is trying to overcome vinyl’s poor reputation among architects and builders who care about aesthetics. Craft, also principal of the Building Design Studio at Town Planning & Urban Design Collaborative, urged VSI to present traditionally correct details “to have credibility with traditional architects.”
By that standard, the binder-style publication is not entirely successful. Many of the houses have “porkchop” eaves, , for example, a historically incorrect detail that has been lambasted in authoritative books like Mouzon’s Traditional Construction Patterns (2004) and Marianne Cusato and Ben Pentreath’s Get Your House Right (2008).
After inspecting VSI’s publication, New Haven architect Robert Orr said, “The thing that’s good is that somebody’s starting to pay attention. It’s a step.” But, looking at a photo of a half-round window surround with a keystone infelicitously inserted in its top, Orr added, “They’ve got a long way to go.”

Health and Environmental Risks
Vinyl is made from two substances: chlorine (57 percent) from common salt salts; and ethylene (43 percent), mostly from natural gas. VSI says vinyl siding is “truly environmental” and “engineered for sustainability.” The Institute hails an “extremely efficient” process that generates virtually no manufacturing waste. “Modest amounts of energy” are used in production and transportation (thanks in part to the product’s light weight), according to the Institute. Moreover, the need for periodic repainting over the years is eliminated.
The claim to “sustainability” is strongly disputed by independent analysts who have studied vinyl and compared it to competing materials. The Healthy Building Network, an environmental health and justice organization with offices across the US, blames vinyl for “a significant portion of the world’s burden of persistent toxic pollutants and endocrine-disrupting chemicals — including dioxin and phthalates.”
The Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee of the US Green Building Council (GBC) conducted a thorough, four-year study of vinyl (PVC) compared to three other kinds of siding — aluminum, wood, and fiber-cement. The results were presented in February 2007. Among the findings:
• “PVC is worst [of the four materials] for cancer impacts” from manufacture through the years that the product is used on buildings; when final disposal is included in the calculations; and in occupational exposures.  
• “PVC has the potential to release toxic gases during building fires that, according to some analyses, can incapacitate building occupants and firefighters, reducing their chance of escaping unharmed. … there is evidence that PVC contributes to hazardous conditions in building fires, but insufficient evidence to determine how widespread or consistent a risk that represents, how it compares to alternatives….”
The alternative materials all have drawbacks. The GBC committee concluded that “aluminum siding is found to be the worst material for many environmental impact categories, while fiber cement is the worst for fossil fuel depletion. When end-of-life impacts are included, wood is the worst for the smog effect.”

Does the industry exaggerate?
VSI says vinyl “outperforms most other cladding materials, including brick, in almost all of the scientific performance criteria in recent analysis using Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability [BEES] software.” Tom Lent, policy director of the Healthy Building Network, takes issue with VSI’s statement.
The purpose of BEES — a software package produced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology — is to provide lifecycle analysis information on building products, helping people assess the total impact of the manufacturing, installation, use, and disposal of those products. “In the BEES analysis,” according to Lent, “ … Vinyl siding had 4 or more times the overall environmental impacts or cedar or aluminum siding, primarily because of its human health impact, which was ten times worse.”
Perhaps the most troubling question is what happens to vinyl when it reaches the end of its usefulness. VSI says old vinyl can be recycled. It rarely is. “Of an estimated 7 billion pounds of PVC thrown away in the US [each year], only 14 million — less than  of 1 percent — is recycled,” Pharos reports.
The danger is that vinyl will be disposed of improperly. If it’s burned in the back yard or in a landfill or a house fire, it gives off dioxin and hydrogen chloride. “In a fire, PVC will release hydrogen chloride gas at relatively low temperatures long before it actually ignites,” Pharos explains. “This gas become hydrochloric acid when it contacts moisture, including moisture in the lungs of those who inhale it, with potentially fatal effects.”
Fires are very common. “The US Fire Administration reports that an average of 8,400 landfill fires are reported each year in the United States — 23 per day,” Lent says. Lent calls them “a huge contributor to dioxin emissions.” Pharos warns: “PVC burning in landfill fires may now be the single largest source of dioxin releases to the environment.”
Allen Blakey of the Vinyl Institute, which is separate from VSI, disputes this, saying that vinyl emits only a fraction of all the dioxin emitted worldwide. “Today, forest fires appear to be far and away the largest source” of dioxin,” he says. However, he acknowledges that “the largest man-made source is backyard/open burning.”
Although nobody knows exactly how much vinyl is consumed in backyard fires and other open burning, certainly some is, and it’s a matter for concern because, as Blakey acknowledges, “Very tiny amounts [of dioxin] are considered carcinogenic, and it takes a long time to break down.” Nonetheless, Blakey says “there’s a big debate over whether dioxin is very harmful to humans,” and he says dioxin from vinyl “doesn’t rank as a serious problem with most public health experts.”
    VSI also cites a Green Building Standard developed by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the International Code Council as evidence that vinyl is environmentally benign. Chicago architect Doug Farr, author of Sustainable Urbanism, says this is misleading.
“They developed [the NAHB rating system] as a watered-down alternative to LEED-Homes,” Farr says. Farr asserts that vinyl proponents “have poached and parsed written statements from USGBC correspondence to create the impression that the green building world endorses vinyl.”