Is Lead Banned in the United States?

#EcoAdvice from our expert

Dear Dr. Donley,

I’ve read about the crisis in Flint, Michigan, where an entire city was exposed to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water, and I’m a little panicked. How could this have happened? Didn’t we ban lead in the 1970s?

Signed,

Singing the Heavy Metal Blues

Dear SHMB,

First off, the crisis in Flint was preventable. By all accounts the incident was a result of the city pinching pennies, and things that should never have happened were allowed to occur. The people of Flint were ignored, deceived and flat-out lied to, and those responsible need to be held accountable.

Lead is all around us. Although naturally locked up in ore in the Earth’s crust, it has been mined and released into the environment for thousands of years. Lead was used in the Roman aqueducts and is so synonymous with plumbing that the Latin word for lead, plumbum, is the basis for the English word plumber. (I’ve been waiting a long time to work that piece of worthless science trivia into something.)

Although lead was mostly banned from plumbing materials in the 1980s, the aged plumbing infrastructure of many of our cities and homes provides a significant source of exposure to many people. This aging infrastructure, combined with the caustic water of the Flint River, led to the state of emergency in Michigan.

We can and should take steps to prevent exposure and clean up contamination that already exists. Lead is not safe at any concentration, and this has been a long-neglected problem in the United States. But despite the mistakes of the past, and the difficult problem we have before us, the fact is we’re still taking lead out of the Earth and releasing it into the environment. Today. Right now.

Surprisingly, leaded gasoline is still the chief source of lead emissions in this country. Although you can’t buy it for your car, you can still buy it for your small-engine airplane, and around 225 million gallons of it are burned each year. Lead bullets and fishing weights are still widely used, despite the many nontoxic alternatives that are available. The greatest threat to the largest bird in North America, the endangered California Condor, is lead poisoning from spent lead ammunition.

The crisis in Flint highlights how our past use of lead can still affect us today, but it also needs to be a warning that our current use of lead is unacceptable and irresponsible. It’s time to get the lead out!

Stay wild,

Dr. Donley

Dr. Nathan Donley is a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity who answers questions about how environmental toxins affect people, wildlife and the environment. Send him your questions at AskDrDonley@biologicaldiversity.org

Check out all previous Ask Dr. Donley installments in one handy place