How Vinyl Flooring made with Uyghur forced labor ends up at Big Box Stores

The story of vinyl flooring begins 6,600 miles away in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, where it is intertwined with the persecution of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs. The same month that Merth wrote her 2020 blog post, in a village in southern Xinjiang, 30-year-old Abdurahman Matturdi was herded onto a bus emblazoned with the words “Zhongtai Chemical.” That’s short for Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Company, a Chinese government-owned petrochemical firm that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a type of plastic that is a critical ingredient...