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Drywall construction should be familiar to anyone who has watched at least one episode of any of the ubiquitous reality shows featuring remodeling to live in, move in, sell, sell better, or flip (often in Canada or California, the preferred venues for cable home show programming). The downsides of drywall are not highlighted in these paeans to the glories of gypsum sandwiched between paper sheets.
Drywall, in its current usage, is a relatively recent construction term. The first citation in print invoked by the Oxford English Dictionary (usually a reliable source in such matters) is, fittingly, a 1950 article in Better Homes & Gardens. The term was adapted form a much older meaning of a wall built without mortar. Modern drywall is loved by contractors because it means never having to say lath and plaster.
Back in the halcyon days of the Eisenhower administration, when drywall construction first took off, manufacturing gypsum plasterboard materials was a purely domestic enterprise. Years past. Nixon went to China. At the Great Wall he is quoted as saying, "I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people." More years past. Chinese-manufactured drywall came to the U.S.
By early 2009, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) was receiving so many complaints from the public about drywall (particularly drywall imported from China), that the agency actually began to investigate the problem. And it takes a lot to get the CPSC moving. The complaints, which had tallied 3900 by that time, centered around two phenomena in new or recently renovated dwellings: corrosion of exposed metal materials and irritating-noisome odors. Both genres of complaints, it turned out, were linked to the same source - imported drywall releasing sulfur containing materials that both discolor metals and smell like rotten eggs. Two weeks ago, the CPSC (jointly with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) circulated a press release announcing that it had completed its final studies intended to help homeowners remediate "problem drywall" (http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml11/11327.html?tab=news).
Problem drywall is a discrete way of putting it, subtly implying that these pesky building materials are just a little hyperactive, or maybe only behaving badly. In fact, the drywall that was tested was confirmed to be releasing substantial amounts of what is referred to in supporting documents as "reactive sulfur gases" or RSG. Although even some domestic brands released detectable RSGs, by far the highest values were from Chinese imports.
RSG is a term that I was completely unfamiliar with, even though I am an occupational and environmental physician well-versed in toxicological exposures. Without other clarification, I might have presumed this was the jargon of a volcanologist used to describe emissions common to eruptions. Actually, this is not far-off. A footnote clarifies that RSG subsumes methyl mercaptan, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon disulfide, among other chemicals. Each of these materials is toxic, including marked adverse effects even at very low levels. Mecaptan has such a foul smell at merely negligible amounts that has traditionally been added as a trace odorant to household gas supplies so that a leak is easily perceived. Hydrogen sulfide, aka sewer gas, at low levels is profoundly irritating - at high levels, it kills. Carbon disulfide (not actually a gas, but a vapor, although who am I to quibble with the CPSC) may be the scariest of all three, because it can cause nervous system damage and also, with chronic low level exposure, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. This is problem drywall the way the kids from Village of the Damned are problem children.
