Gina Solomon's Blog
Lead in Toys and in our Air
March 31, 2008
Posted by Gina Solomon in Health and the Environment
I just got back from a visit with my adorable 9 month old nephew in Florida. It was fun to hold him and play with him. He’s even starting to crawl, and we got some great photos and video of the key moments. Like any auntie, I came bearing gifts. Of course, each one was carefully scrutinized for hazards – especially for potential contamination with lead. Lead contaminated toys have been in the news so much over the last year that you’d have to live under a rock not to be aware of that problem. I wasn’t going to risk bringing even a small amount of lead into Johnnie’s house, since I know how dangerous lead can be to the developing brain of a young child.
During the visit, we explored the local area and even took a short drive to see the manatees snoozing in the warm waters near the local power plant. Yet even I (obsessed with pollution as I am) didn’t check on the local polluters until the end of the visit. I was disturbed by what I found.
A few miles down the road from my 9 month old nephew, there’s a big orange dot on our map of lead polluters. Progress Energy, Inc. pumps out 2,643 pounds of lead into the air each year. That’s over 2 ½ tons of lead into the air right near where Johnnie’s little vulnerable lungs are breathing. The other power plant – the one making warm soup for the manatees – puts out another three-quarters of a ton of airborne lead. An additional half-ton of lead comes from the small planes running on Avgas at the local municipal airport just a few miles from Johnnie’s house. Most people don’t know that small aircraft still burn leaded gasoline, even though it was banned for cars many decades ago. Studies have shown that some communities downwind from airports have significantly elevated lead levels in the soil due to deposition of airborne lead particles.
Today – back on the job – I wrote technical comments to the EPA about the design of the monitoring network for airborne lead pollution. One of EPA’s analyses showed that a single source that emits about 60 pounds of lead (that’s only 0.03 tons per year) could result in air levels that exceed the most health protective levels that EPA’s scientific advisors are recommending to guard children’s health. Now I’m trying not to be nitpicky, but the amount of lead coming out of Johnnie's two local power plants and the airport adds up to over 85-times the 60 pound threshold. Of course, most of the lead is probably blowing offshore to poison the manatees instead of my nephew, but it would be nice if there was less lead blowing around in the air.
The thing that saddens me most is that things are pretty good in my nephew’s neighborhood, relatively speaking. Many kids have it far worse, with much more lead pollution sprinkled through their communities. So let’s keep buying the lead-free toys for our kids, but let’s also support more stringent government standards to control the lead that we aren’t buying – the lead from the polluters down the street.
To look for lead polluters near you, check out: Get the Lead Out!
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- Gina Solomon
- Senior Scientist
- San Francisco
- I've been a Senior Scientist at NRDC for twelve years, and my work is focused on protecting people...
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