The Manufacture of PVC In The Modern Threat of Plastics, the second e-seminar in the series The Politics of Pollution, Columbia Professors David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz focus on polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or vinyl. A cheap, flexible material, vinyl can be formed into a soft, puttylike material, made as hard as rock, or altered to resemble other, more expensive materials. This Flash interactive tracks the industrial manufacture of PVC from the distillation of crude oil, through a number of transformations and recombinations with other elements to produce the final product.