The Consumer Product Safety Commission voted yesterday to require that toys be 99.99% lead-free, versus the current standard of 99.97% lead-free. Like the old standard, however, the new standard will have no impact on any child’s health.
As we pointed out previously, the only children harmed by lead in toys have been kids who have swallowed solid lead trinkets. There is no evidence that anyone has ever been harmed — not even a single IQ point lost — by exposure to trace lead levels in consumer products or ambient lead levels.
As usual this is just a bone to throw to the public to appease the dogs. No meat – just the illusion of action. Likely it will have little effect, as toys that are already 99.97% lunleaded should have little trouble becoming 99.99% unleaded – mostly by switching to lead-free solder for the embedded electronics. There the high risk of failure from tin whiskers will be far less catastrophic that it would in military electronics.
The easy cure for this junk science is to limit standards to what’s commonly found in nature. If there’s a general proportion of lead in soils of say 2%, then that’s the manufacturing limit for any particular component such as paint. This applies to the sub components such as pigments not necessarily to the overall value.
The old paints were usually based upon some form of metal, and I wonder if our current problems with bedbugs and such (perhaps even asthma in children) are partly because we no longer coat our houses and outbuildings with paints that are toxic to small organisms. Another toxic metal is copper, which is also in brass. That is why doorknobs were usually made from brass in the old days, and women had copper bowls in their kitchens.
For years potable water tanks were coated inside with red lead primer.
How many billions of gallons of water was drunk from these tanks is incalcuble. This would have been the generations that won both world wars and developed the atomic bomb. I say bring back red lead water tanks and maybe some asbestos. (I hope no one ever realizes how many miles of transite (asbestos) waterlines are in the ground. On second thought it might stop some liberals from drinking water.