Blue Vinyl is lefty scare-mongering propaganda, but nevertheless worth a viewing. Helfand gives enough names and references to provide the viewer with opportunity for deeper research if desired. Chemical-phobic true believers will love the film, and skeptics will find plenty of examples of bad science and misleading presentation to debunk and debate.
JH's crusade against vinyl chloride is so intense that she seems unaware of her daily use of hundreds of other synthetics, such as the toxic-spawned semiconductors in her cameras, phones, and transportation. She inflicts this intensity upon her parents, who seem to bear fairly well a level of hectoring that would surely shorten my lifespan if I had to endure it like they did. (I would have had a stroke sometime during the days-long sales presentation by the California mud architect.)
She concludes that wood is a dandy safe building material, and recommends old planking recovered from demolished picturesque mills in New Hampshire, at premium cost. Since the supply of quaint old mills and barns is limited, sooner or later she's going to have to start cutting down forests, and that will probably upset some of her allies. It's not as if there are any work-related injuries or deaths in the lumber industry! (And if your house catches fire, be sure to breathe in that harmless innocent wood smoke; it's so much better for you than PVC combustion products.)
Let me mention just two specific problems with the film: 1) She depicts the Bucket Brigade, a grass-roots air-sampling project in a Louisiana community. But she fails to show whether any _control_ samples were taken, which would establish whether the samples were perhaps contaminated by the _plastic_ bags in which they were collected. 2) She interviews a spokesperson for the vinyl industry (a PhD organic chemist.) She goes out of her way to demonstrate her frustration that the interview is limited to 30 minutes. Well, guess what? She doesn't even show you the full 30 minute interview; she edits it down to about two minutes, most of which is taken up by her canned questions. The least she could have done was to include the full, unedited interview in the DVD extras, but I have a feeling that would have been too fair to her nemesis.