Cold Calling

DANNY WILLIAMS ‘COLD CALLING’

Each month our special correspondent Danny Williams* replies to a reader’s letter...

“For only the second time that I can recall, the other day a customer questioned me about what happens to the old PVC-U windows that we were removing from her house, which we replaced with brand new PVC-U. I thought there would be more concern about ‘plastic’ and pollution with everything in the newspapers and on TV. What have you found?”

RJ Sussex

I remember back to the end of 2017/ early 2018 when, after watching the documentaries that showed plastic floating in the sea like plankton, that the legend that is Sir David Attenborough might actually put an end to my business, and possibly a whole industry.

The images were shocking and I believed that there could only be one outcome: a universal condemnation of plastics across the board, irrespective of their type and use. I regard myself as a rational man but I feared that at the very least, homeowners that were already being presented with the alternative of a new wave of aluminium windows and doors, would switch to metal frames because, after all, they’re all made of recycled coca cola tins, right? Well the revolution never began. Unlike you RJ, although I suspect that my tiny retail operation is considerably smaller than your own, we have never received an objection from a punter that our plastic windows were poisoning the planet. Not one. Your note to me could not have been better timed RJ, because appearing in the trade press currently is a report from my friend Rob McGlennon who runs Deceuninck, my biggest supplier of plastic window profiles, that an independent survey found that “44% of total respondents flatly rejected the prospect of buying home improvements manufactured in ‘plastic’’’. Rob goes on to say: “The increased awareness about the impact single use plastics are having, is great. For our industry, the fact that this survey reveals that consumers aren’t drawing a line between them and low maintenance, long-life and fully recyclable plastic building products, is a warning of things to come – unless we act now and start to communicate effectively with the homeowner.” Well Rob has been around in this industry even longer than I have and has been in position at Deceuninck since well before Sir Attenborough’s shock-horror revelations four years ago. And I can pretty much guarantee that even without a forensic study of Deceuninck’s sales figures, they will only have seen continued growth in that period. As have the rest of us.

So where was this ‘independent research’ – which I note further down the editorial, was paid for by Deceuninck - conducted? By what freakish bad luck did the pollsters stumble upon so many devout tree huggers? Because to my eternal relief and the experience of pretty much every other seller of PVC-U windows and doors, the horrors brought to our living rooms so graphically by the Blue Planet movies, have not had even the tiniest measurable impact on sales of plastic windows. That Rob and his team are pushing the firm’s new recycling plant through this release becomes clear after a more thorough read. And that is laudable because the plastics from which our windows and doors are manufactured are, having been produced initially from resources extracted from the earth’s crust, incredibly valuable and should be used over again when they are removed from people’s houses.

But the wake-up call that Rob says his research represents has been suppressed by a four year snooze button. It is simply not an issue and neither is there the faintest whiff of it becoming one. Which of course, is a huge shame because PVC-U is the nearest thing that we have to a ‘sustainable’ plastic. The reality is that we humans hate our lifestyles being disrupted. And despite the Deceuninck research concluding that 38% of UK homeowners would pay more for more sustainable products, I can only say: Maybe. But certainly not windows. And if we are willing to pay more, it’s not much.

In fact, an experiment conducted by Imperial College and the University of Oxford no less, showed that while the documentary increased environmental awareness in a group of volunteers, it did not translate into choosing fewer single use plastics. And that is the crap that was actually photographed killing turtles and choking sealife; as far as I know they have yet to find an old PVC-U casement at the bottom of the Caribbean. When it became clear back in 2018 that sales of PVC-U windows were not going to fall off a cliff, I began to ask why? I told myself that, actually, Mr and Mrs Jones understood the difference between old Fanta bottles and a flush sash; that they had reasoned and researched and found that the stuff their new windows were being made from was sustainable and could be recycled over and over. But actually, I just think that none of us really care, as long as we have what we want, that our lives are not disrupted. A mindset that is further reinforced by the need to console ourselves for the ‘hardships’ that we have all suffered through the pandemic. Or at least that’s what my sales figures suggest. Having picked the Deceuninck item apart, I should say that I fully support Rob’s aims, which is to increase throughput at his company’s recycling plant specifically and generally to drive up the number of old plastic windows that get recycled into new products. PVC-U really is a remarkable material and according to blurb that seems to have become part of the fabric of recycling, it can be recycled as many as seven times, although how they can work it out so precisely, I have no idea, as the promoted view is that will take us 350 years into the future. But all of this seems to focus on what happens to old frames as they are removed. There still seems to be a reluctance to openly promote the inclusion of recycled material in new profiles, something that was discussed during the Glazing Summit that I attended last last year; and which was fudged over. Privately I have been told by a couple of systems company execs that ‘fabricators don’t like second-hand material in their profiles’. Which to my mind - and now considering the findings in the Deceuninck research - is utter balls.

Of course, the 44% that Rob’s research says are not buying plastic windows may have been replaced by the same number that don’t give a flying. But if, as I believe, sales have not been disrupted at all, ensuring that we promote PVC-U windows and doors as being sustainable may actually increase business by tapping in to new punters. When every other consumer industry promotes sustainability of their products to death, it makes no sense at all for ours to not do the same.