Emissions of hazardous compounds during PVC manufacturing processes

Raw plastic materials used in the plastic manufacturing industries are pellets, powder or sheet mixtures constituted by the main polymer together with several additives (e.g., plasticizers, stabilizers, antioxidants, pigments). The manufacturing processes themselves depend on both the polymer characteristics and the artifact characteristics. During the plastic manufacturing, toxic products can enter the working environment due to the plastic heating. A complete environmental analysis looking for all the pollutants that can be foreseen is usually carried out to define if the workers' risk level is acceptable or not. Therefore, a simple and cheap screening procedure has been developed and validated by comparison with environmental analysis carried out in two PVC manufacturing industries. Such a procedure can give information on which toxic products are expected to enter the working environment as well as on the relative amount of such products, and it can be used to screen which situations deserve a deeper environmental analysis. For this reason, a preliminary study aimed to evaluate the release of toxic compounds in manufactures of extruded cables has been carried out. Main aim of the work was to identify and quantify the possible emissions released by several PVC-based materials once they undergo heating treatments; typical operating conditions that are used during cable production have been reproduced in a laboratory-scale apparatus and different analytical techniques have been applied in order to detect the emissions. In particular, the attention has been focused on the determination of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and aldehydes. During the experiments, plastic samples were rapidly exposed to an hot environment, kept in isothermal condition, at different temperatures depending on the type of material and the duration of the reference industrial activity.