Fighting The Poison That Never Went Away
Out of residential paints for decades, lead still haunts our homes in modern-day pots, pans, dishes, and even baby bottles. Washington State answered with the first-ever ban on lead-tainted cookware.
You might call lead the poison we’ve long since recognized and stopped worrying about. Having removed it from gasoline and residential paints decades ago, we’re apt to think the dangers posed by this potent neurotoxin, which is especially devastating to infants and young children, have also gone away.
But the truth is, they haven’t.
This heavy metal, which the EPA describes as being able to impact “nearly every organ system in humans,” is still in our homes, water, consumer goods, and environment. You can find lead in your kitchen in both old and new dishware, in shiny pots and pans from retailers such as Target and Walmart, and shockingly, even in the paint on some baby bottles. Supported by a powerful lobby that has changed its name and marketing tactics over the years, the business of lead has never been more profitable.
The ‘Mystery’ That Morphed Into Legislation
In March 2024, Washington became the first state to enact legislation limiting the amount of lead in cookware.
Applying to anything “intended for the preparation or storage of food,” House Bill 1551, which will take effect in 2026, prohibits the sale or distribution of cookware in the state containing lead that measures over five parts per million (ppm). Going beyond the FDA concept of “purity,” proof of lead leaching into food is not required.
While the FDA has the authority to remove any cookware it deems unsafe from the market, such determinations would be made on a “case by case basis,” said an FDA official. The agency has no specified lead level, leaching or otherwise, that would trigger an official action. And while the FDA is mainly concerned about food contact surfaces, the Washington state law covers all the “components” of cookware including lids, knobs, and handles.
Spurred by the “mystery” of why so many Afghan immigrants in the state, both kids and adults, had very high blood lead levels, several years of investigation by King County scientists finally found the cause—traditional-style Afghan aluminum pressure cookers, which contained varying amounts of lead ranging from over 1,000 to 34,000 ppm.
Representative Gerry Pollet, primary sponsor of the legislation, called it a “detective story” solved by a “public health investigation done right.” Instead of finding it was the water or the paint, said Pollet, “it was the cookware” that proved to be the culprit.
Finding similarly high levels of lead after testing a wide range of aluminum cookware purchased online, King County health officials sent out warnings to retailers such as Amazon and Etsy, and even the FDA, with limited success.
Although the legislation ultimately passed unanimously, opposition arose in the form of “all sorts of claims made about how unfair it was to industry,” said Pollet, along with “significant lobbying to kill it” consisting of private, one-on-one meetings with lawmakers focusing on the cost. “That’s often a favorite way of killing legislation without getting your fingerprints all over it,” he added.
Getting the Lead Out—of Baby Bottles
Long before the state of Washington introduced legislation about lead in cookware, there was Tamara Rubin.
Rubin’s ongoing advocacy work—which has included the making of a documentary film, the testing of untold numbers of dishes, mugs, cups, pots, pans, and baby bottles, as well as having initiated independent laboratory testing for scores of food items—was directly responsible for five FDA and Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls during the past two years.
Starting with her website Lead Safe Mama several years after her sons were poisoned by lead exposure during home renovations in the summer of 2005, much of Rubin’s work is now focused on getting the lead out of baby bottles. That’s right, baby bottles.
“I want them to stop using lead paint on baby bottles,” Rubin said. “It doesn’t seem like it’s a big request.”
To that end, last year she created and installed over 2,000 panels appearing in New York City subways with the message that dishes, glasses, and baby bottles can contain significantly high levels of lead. “Why hasn’t the New York Times done a front-page article that there’s lead paint on baby bottles today and that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is allowing it?” asked Rubin.
Despite lead in paint and gasoline being prohibited decades ago, those legacy uses are still the “primary contributing factor” to lead poisoning, Rubin said. However, research now shows that “low-level, persistent lead exposure from non-industrial sources is causing harm in ways not previously quantified or identified,” she stated.
And you don’t have to look very hard to confirm that.
In 2023 the American Heart Association issued a “scientific statement” warning of “robust” evidence linking “low or moderate levels” of lead to a significantly increased risk (up to 85 percent) of heart disease and stroke. A study published in The Lancet in 2018 stated that exposure to low levels of lead is “an important, but largely overlooked, risk factor for cardiovascular disease mortality in the USA.”
The National Toxicology Program noted over a decade ago that “. . . studies continue to provide evidence of health effects at lower and lower blood lead levels.” The accompanying NTP monographs cover low-level lead damage to the heart, brain, kidneys, and immune system, along with reproductive and developmental effects.
So how much lead exposure is considered the tipping point?
“There’s no safe level of lead exposure. And that’s universally agreed on,” said Rubin, adding, “I’m talking about everyone, not just children.”
Despite also stating that there is no safe level of lead exposure, agencies such as the FDA, EPA, and CPSC have wildly varying standards of how much lead they find acceptable.
The FDA, for example, permits up to 5 parts per billion (ppb) in bottled water (including water marketed for infants), but the EPA allows up to 15 ppb in public drinking water. The FDA’s “action level” of lead in apple juice is 10 ppb, yet it raises that to 20 ppb in other juices. To comply with the CPSC for children’s products, including those made for infants, any “accessible” parts cannot exceed 100 parts per million of lead, and any paint or “surface coatings” cannot exceed 90 ppm. And before 2009, when the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act slowly eased into effect, paint and coatings on children’s products were permitted to have up to 600 ppm. That makes thrift-store kid items and family hand-me-downs potentially risky where lead is concerned.
And even those enforcement levels don’t mean much. Rubin has found between 3,000 and 40,000 ppm of lead in the paint used on certain glass baby bottles.
Shiny, New, and Lead-Laden
Figuring out if the cookware you’re interested in purchasing contains lead—and how much—isn’t something consumers can easily do. There are some clues, however, such as when products are labeled with lead (and other chemical) warnings, but confusingly some nearly identical items bear no such cautions. And the amount of lead in any particular cookware item is not something big retailers are interested in talking about.
Target, for example, introduced a line of pots, pans, and kitchen gadgets under the name Figmint in 2023. Some pieces, such as the enameled cast iron skillets in the line carry a notice stating they contain a chemical cocktail of lead, cadmium, cobalt, and lithium carbonate. A website listed on the label for “more information” only displays more kitchenware for sale, despite the page being titled “cookware disclosures.”
Taking questions about these Figmint skillets directly to Target didn’t result in any more details than was revealed on its webpage. The only response elicited by numerous emails to a Target spokesperson with basic questions such as “Does Target test the Figmint pans for the amount of lead they contain?” was a note asking, “What outlet are you writing for?” and “What is your piece about?”
Walmart, which sells a private label line of pots, wasn’t any more forthcoming in answering questions about its Mainstays stainless steel saucepan. Typically, stainless steel cookware is considered a safe choice where lead is concerned. These, however, were labeled with a warning for “lead and lead compounds,” along with cobalt, aluminum, cadmium, and other metals. Walmart did not respond to any questions about the product.
According to Rubin, industry is mostly self-policing when it comes to cookware. And unlike Washington state, the FDA only seems concerned about lead leaching during testing (while lead may not leach out when an item is new, repeated washing and cooking, especially of acidic foods, can change that).
Whether certain Walmart or Target cookware will be legal in Washington state after 2026 is unknown. Pollet, however, notes that these “are some of the world’s largest retailers, and if they’ve got a product that they have reason to believe might have lead in it they had better get it tested.”
When Industry Dictates Policy
For nearly a century, well-connected and powerful trade associations for the lead industry have conducted a wildly successful campaign to support the ongoing use of lead.
Operating from 1928 until it was dissolved in 2002, the Lead Industries Association “authored” a playbook that, among other victories, succeeded in having major cities actually mandate the use of lead pipes.
As reported in the LIA 1939 Board of Directors meeting in New York City, “The program continues to be influential in seeing that lead is given proper consideration in city and state plumbing codes through the United States.”
This “plumbing promotion program” (that also sold a “Seal of Approval of the Lead Industries Association” for $25 a year) was indeed so influential that the 1939 report lists thirty-three cities, from Bakersfield, California to Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and two states, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as requiring lead pipes to be used in plumbing or water distribution. “It must be remembered that adoption of laws, as above, is slow work,” the meeting minutes stated, “but once adopted make a relatively permanent requirement of lead.”
Those successes were, in fact, so “permanent,” that, right up to 1984, the plumbing code for the city of Chicago mandated that pipes two inches or smaller in diameter were required to contain lead. In 1986 the federal government finally banned the use of lead pipes and lead solder in all new plumbing systems, but to this day millions of lead service lines (which connect the city water lines to homes and businesses) remain in use.
The LIA also had its work cut out for it in the ongoing campaign to keep bad news about lead in gasoline either suppressed or regarded as not applicable to the general public. Almost from the get-go in the early 1920s workers for Ethyl Corporation, where tetraethyl lead fuel was formulated, reported suffering tremors, hallucinations, and other serious effects of brain and nerve damage, resulting in five deaths—with several employees committed to asylums.
Despite numerous experts speaking out, one being Yale University professor Dr. Yandell Henderson, who stated in a 1925 New York Times article that the effects of leaded gasoline, or “looney gas” as it was called, are slow and insidious, and the “greatest health menace to ever face the public,” it hung on for many decades. Lead in automotive fuel wasn’t prohibited in the U.S. until 1996 for “on-road vehicles.” And it took until 2021 for an across-the-globe phaseout to take place.
According to a 1988 report to Congress, “4 to 5 million metric tons of lead from gasoline remain in dust, soil, and sediments.” Adding to the historic totals are current-day lead particles coming from piston-engine planes and helicopters that are still permitted to use leaded fuel.
The Lead Beat Goes On
Despite declaring bankruptcy and shutting down operations over twenty years ago, the Lead Industries Association never really went away. It rearranged its letters and morphed into the present-day International Lead Association. In keeping with tradition, the ILA continues to disseminate lead-favorable research wherever needed.
As part of the Clean Air Act requirements, the EPA asked in 2023 for public comments regarding the issuance of its Integrated Science Assessment for Lead review. The ILA was only too eager to take part.
In a response sent to the EPA in June of 2023, the ILA’s senior scientist for “health,” stated that the association’s “principal concern” with the new draft document was that a whole slew of “recent studies” regarding lead exposure and health were “omitted from the narrative.”
The ILA went on to cite numerous findings, curiously all within the last ten years, concluding that low-level lead exposure isn’t so bad after all.
The studies, from 2013 right up to 2023, all managed to find that low blood lead levels have “minimal” ill effects on numerous body functions, such as neurological, cardiovascular, and renal.
Then there was this, a 2020 study on lead exposure and IQ sponsored by the International Lead Association and conducted by Ramboll US Consulting. Called an “important paper” with “serious implications” in the press release issued by Ramboll, the study put the blame on mothers—specifically undereducated, unmarried women—for their children’s lower IQ measurements—not the lead to which they had been exposed.
“Highly likely” and previously “unrecognized” factors, such as a mother’s marital status at her child’s birth, along with her education level “influenced IQ” in a proven way that “may exceed . . . previously reported effects of blood lead on IQ . . .” the ILA stated in a 2023 letter to the EPA.
The Ramboll press release cautioned that “low-dose effects can be seriously misrepresented,” and this information should be “taken as a warning by epidemiologists and risk assessors.”
Of course, blaming parents, historically low-income families—and especially mothers—for a child’s IQ and behavioral issues is nothing new for the lead industry, nor are sponsored studies with pre-determined results in mind. Minutes of a board of directors meeting in 1968 of the Lead Industries Association talk about a proposed study to measure the “morbidity and mortality of the industry’s workers,” which will “attempt to show” that they have “no more ills than the general population.”
Despite all that we know by now about the insidious effects that exposure to lead can cause, the global lead market, which was valued at nearly $20 billion in 2022 and is expected to hit $30 billion by 2030, continues to exert major influence on efforts to “get the lead out” of ordinary commodities (not to mention ammunition, which is still a leading use of lead).
Given the fact that lead is now universally recognized as a hazardous neurotoxin, marketing this heavy metal in the twenty-first century calls for new tactics. The Lead Association, for instance, now promotes it as “the pathway to a low carbon future.” Lead, in fact, is even considered the new green due to its use in wind (including lead-sheathed submarine cables for offshore wind turbines) and solar energy.
But as the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said in a report to Congress over thirty years ago, “lead is potentially toxic wherever it is found—and it is found everywhere.”
 | A guest post by
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As a former chemist, I would presume that most of the heavy metals in enameled cookware are bound within the enamel coating as colorant.