Getting the Goods

Lead poisoning and pollution:
source control solutions

by K.W. James Rochow

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Lead poisoning and pollution remains a major problem worldwide, seriously impeding individual and social and economic development. The nature of the disease—it is essentially incurable in vulnerable populations, notably children—and the practicability of solutions—virtually all sources can be effectively controlled—require primary prevention based on identification, control, and elimination of sources. This necessary focus on source control solutions requires in turn that lead poisoning and pollution be viewed through the lens of production and consumption and trade.

The widespread dispersion of lead—otherwise an intact element—into the environment began with the Industrial Revolution, when it formed a useful constituent of a wide variety of products. The use of lead additives in gasoline and paint comprise two of the most harmful uses of lead. Both leaded gasoline and lead-based paint have been heavily promoted as useful and wholly or largely benign products by corporate advertising, public relations, and disinformation campaigns. No one has ever successfully been held liable for manufacturing and distributing these known toxic products (although there are on-going lawsuits in the U. S. against the lead pigment industry).

The problems with leaded gasoline and lead-based paint persist and illustrate the vampire-like difficulties of eliminating harmful products and their effects. Over fifty countries still use leaded gasoline, including most of Africa. Incredibly, another metal (manganese) additive, MMT, is being promoted as the substitute of choice for lead additives in gasoline, despite the fact that the use of MMT
poses the potential to repeat many of the worst aspects of the disastrous "experiment" in leaded gasoline. Lead-based paint seems an underestimated problem in most of the world and may actually be increasing as the incidence of paint application attendant to modernization and notions of decorative fashion rises. Both lead sources have contributed greatly to the vast reservoir of dispersed lead that must be addressed even after the products themselves cease to exist.

The lead additive in gasoline is now almost exclusively manufactured by one company in England and exported to the developing world. This is symptomatic of the inequitable flow of lead products and wastes from the developed to the developing world. The cottage industry of "cracking" imported discarded lead acid batteries constitutes another serious, sometimes lethal source of childhood lead poisoning in developing countries.

A framework for solutions to lead poisoning informed by the perspective of production and consumption and trade would encompass: 1) proactive consumer education designed to engage them as a constituency of support for source control and elimination; 2) lead industry accountability and fair share contribution of resources to solving the health and environmental problems they are ultimately responsible for creating; 3) phase-out programs for substitution of lead-containing products; 4) ban on export of hazardous lead products; and 5) life cycle accounting to control production and exposure throughout the entire life cycle of lead from mining to manufacture and distribution to ultimate disposal. —By K. W. James Rochow, President, Trust for Lead Poisoning Prevention. For more information on this issues, visit www.globalleadnet.org. You can reach the author at jrochow@globalleadnet.org.