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These pages are identified as "non-toxic PVC" safe for coins. So I'm not sure if I am going from one bad situation to another bad situation years down the road.
Isn't all PVC bad for coins?
John1
I guess that is my question. What is meant by "non-toxic PVC"? So far I have only been able to find 2 manufacturers/distributors of these type of pages and both are listed as PVC. Are there others that don't require 2x2s?"Non-toxic" sounds like marketing spiel; of course it's "non-toxic" in the sense that it's not poisonous and won't kill you if you eat it. The "toxicity" of a plastic has nothing to do with whether or not that plastic is actually "safe for coins". "Acid-free" would be a more meaningful and useful adjective, but also an adjective that could be proven or disproven in court.
As for your and John's question: yes, it is theoretically possible for "coin-safe PVC" to exist. That's because it is not the PVC itself that harms coins, it's the plasticizers they add to the PVC.
PVC, in its "raw" state, is a hard brittle solid that is not very transparent - quite "safe for coins" in this state, but quite useless if the goal is to actually take the coins in and out of the album page, and to see the coins inside the album. To make PVC soft and transparent, they need to add plasticizer. The plasticizer they usually add is a phthalate diester (diisodeyl phthalate is common, though there are others). These phthalates are liquids, and they slowly leach out of the plastic as the plastic ages. Phthalates themselves are also harmless to coins, but to make phthalates, you need to add concentrated sulfuric acid, and some of this acid remains dissolved in the phthalates afterwards and gets added to the PVC mixture with the phthalates. It is that sulfuric acid which damages coins, as the sulfuric acid travels with the phthalates as they escape the PVC.
In theory, you can use something else besides phthalates as a plasticizer - something that doesn't have any acid in it. Phthalates are used for the same reason PVC itself is used: it's the cheapest option. "Acid-free PVC coin pages" thus can exist, but they will be considerably more expensive than regular PVC pages. It would probably be cheaper for a coin album manufacturer to avoid PVC and use another plastic altogether. That way they could honestly claim their pages are "PVC-free".
In terms of sourcing album pages to fit a 2x2, may I suggest trying a photographic supplies store. Old-style photographic slides are also 2 inches by 2 inches, so a slide album page also makes a perfect coin album page. And photography hobbyists have always been wary of anything that contains plasticizers, because if solvent transfer happens to a photographic slide or a negative, the slide is ruined forever. So slide album pages are almost always made from high-quality plasticizer-free plastic. The people who make these pages also know that photographic slides are a dying hobby and are keen to expand their business into numismatics. I've always used
PrintFile brand slide pages to house my 2x2s.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Posted 01/12/2024 1:50 pm
