http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090411/ap_on_bi_ge/chinese_drywall At least 100.000 homes were built or rebuilt with cheap drywall purchased from China. After a while it gives off a sulfurous smell. It reacts with copper and destroys copper plumbing.It probably will have to be removed. I guess there is no reason for inspection and standards.
There are reports of it making people sick too. I guess dogs and cats were not enough.
I’m not at all surprised. I’m sure there will be endless other things that will come along. I would not be surprised to find out that cheap-o Walmart t-shirts will someday be found to be soaked in dye impregnated with any manner of poisons. This is because we are buying cheap goods from a country of a billion who don’t care about such details, or the environment, or anything really except making money to feed the billion mouths and make more mouths to feed . I don’t see any way out of it. People want cheap stuff. If good stuff was made in USA factories (ha.ha.) no one would buy it because it would be too expensive. I know I’m reciting the obvious, but that’s the way it is. We are stuck.
Oh, and before someone jumps down my throat, I’m not saying the Chinese should all just starve. I understand why they don’t care. When you have a population of a billion, you gotta be able to feed 'em, and quick. (Pet food not nutritious enough? Well, let’s up the protein level with this cheap shit, and let’s throw it in baby formula while we’re at it. They want drywall? Can do, quick, crank some out.). They are as much ‘stuck’ as we are.
I am not a fan of their destroying over 100,000 homes.regardless of how large their population is. They can make it the right way.
i wonder how much of it was used in their building boom in China. The owner of the company would face execution.
Why don’t we have these problems with Malaysian and Singaporean goods, which are made in factories which are owned by Chinese families who for many decades have pretty well colonized that area of Asia?
The problem isn’t ethnicity of the ownership of businesses, it’s ethics of the governmental/industrial system. COMMUNIST China is a shitheel governmental entity with no morals.
Lack of oversight and inspections.
Lack of safety laws.
Build/expand at any cost mentality.
Shortcuts create more profit mentality.
Remember the “Gee, our customers LIKE the fact that their wheat gluten contains chemicals that are toxic but fraudulently boost the protein readings” excuses that first came out?
That, my friends, is unbridaled Capitalism at it’s best/worst.
Somewhere, a couple of our prominent board members are salivating.
Capitalism without regulation gets us things like this.
I laughed when I first read the story.
No doubt I am hellbound, if there is a hell.
http://bill.iworkhere.com/books/pournelle/assorted/footfall/0345323440__17.htm
I can’t wait to hear how it is all the fault of the idiots who bought houses with this defective drywall installed in it, because they should have done their research and known better. (Cue the usual suspects)
The market will sort it all out though, right? The company that makes/imports the defective material will go out of business, consumers will gravitate to companies that make good products, and everything will be right with the world. Libertarianism in action. The government has no place in the house-building business!
After all, there is no need for government red tape and regulation right? I’m sure that someone can develop a good rant about a useless government agency that does nothing but inspect building materials. These type of onerous regulations just suffocate the good businesses that need all the breaks they can get right?
Sad fact is that businesses that cut corners on safety , labor and materials will win. We are in a mad dash to the bottom.
Sure, I give homeowners a break - who inspects their drywall? Even home inspectors are sometimes idiots and miss obvious things.
What about idiots who deliberately bought the cheapest imported drywall they possibly could for home repair and renovation? Is there no point at which the stingy person pays the most, or do they need their “bailout” too?
This pisses me off a bit because several coal power plants with gypsum-producing scrubbers that I work with are having to take their very high-quality gypsum and just bury it in landfills, because they can’t sell it in a market where shoddy imported drywall is cheaper. In fact one plant, which was over-scrubbing their SO2 to make more gypsum to sell (and thus deliberately making less pollution) stopped over-scrubbing and now does the bare minimum required, since their gypsum which they used to sell for $5 a ton now must be landfilled at $12.50 a ton. Multiply by 50,000 tons/year, and you’re talking real money. Woo hoo, everyone loses!
I suppose they rather naively believed that legitimate stores would not buy from importers who obtained toxic material. I know - crazy thought!
I agree with you - and wish that the TOTAL costs of products could somehow be accounted for. The total cost would account for the environmental cost as well as the human suffering cost.
Perhaps a good rule of thumb would be: Would you be happy if the product you purchase was made in a factory 4 blocks away from where you live? Would you be OK if your neighbors worked in this factory at the prevailing rate of pay? Would you be comfortable if this product were recycled/disposed of at a location 4 blocks the other way from your home?
Even the contractors that bought this stuff on the cheap…just how could they know that this stuff would begin to smell like shit after a certain amount of time? What tests could they have performed to ensure the quality of what they were purchasing?
It strikes me as odd that the shoddy imported stuff is emitting hydrogen sulfide. They’re starting with SO2 too, right? What are they doing to get such a reduced compound out of fly ash?
They’re not making gypsum from fly ash (in fact, too much fly ash contamination means you can’t use the gypsum any more), they’re making from forced oxidation of the limestone or lime + SO2 process, resulting in CaSO4 * 2H2O. Why is SO2 devolving? That depends on whether the source is natural or human-generated. If it’s natural source I can’t tell you why; if human-generated then they’re not fully oxidizing the CaSO3 into CaSO4, which saves them a tiny amount of money by not running as many forced oxidation blowers or by not building/operating a good gypsum production plant.
The core problem is not that it contains “toxic material” (of course, nearly any chemical at a hardware store contains some toxic material - try taking a look at what volatizes from fresh paint on your walls some day), it’s that the material is breaking down or releasing trapped SO2. Because it’s cheap, shoddy shit. A lot of the time in life you get what you pay for, and if people deliberately choose the cheapest products then they have to expect that there is, at a minimum, a higher risk that those products may not be held to the same QC as the more expensive ones. This is not universally nor uniformly true, but often true. Just as someone who buys generic tools from Wal-Mart shouldn’t expect they will last as long or be as safe to use as Craftsman, MAC, Snap-On, et al.
It’s a simple question - at what point does someone bear some significant responsibility for the results of choosing the cheapest possible product? From what I’ve seen on the SDMB over the years, sadly, the answer is often “never.”
However, I don’t think that one would expect that Wal Mart tools would be so shoddy as to actively destroy the car you use them to work on, months/years after the job was completed.
In terms of “shoddy drywall” I don’t think of outgassing chemicals that will destroy my plumbing and give me asthma, I think of uneven thickness, poor joints, and voids. When I buy cheap dogfood, I’m expecting more grains and filler, not more poisons.
There is a line where a manufacturer goes from “making a cheap product” to “defrauding and endangering the customer”. I don’t think it’s fair to blame customers who unknowingly bought products that crossed the line.
Chinese drywall danger
The above is my favorite new band name of the day, surpassing “Dr. X and The Half-Dead Cecum” (work-related).
I gotta be honest with ya. It never would have occurred to me in a million years that I would have to worry about even the cheapest of drywall becoming toxic after a few years.
Odesio