Polybutylene pipe and fitting failures
Appears at 2 points in 2 lectures.
Appearances across the corpus
Eventually Hoechst Celanese paid a 900 million dollar class action trust fund to help fix these things. And DuPont did something larger but it was confidential. They probably paid a billion or a billion and a half to make it so people could take these things out of their house. A similar type of thing with polybutylene, for plastic fittings and things. So you've got to be careful when you introduce a brand new material into some commodity product to make sure you thought about all the important things.
Plumbing material that replaced polyethylene; fittings susceptible to stress corrosion cracking in certain water chemistries; class action settlement.
The problem with polyethylene is at about a hundred forty or a hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit it will creep, it will bulge, it will get an aneurysm, and it will explode on you — or you know, it'll burst and you'll have a flood. So people tried better things like polybutylene, a longer chain hydrocarbon. They put that in lots of houses. Anybody ever have a house that had polybutylene fittings? Yeah, what happened?