My mom writes:
Don’t know how valid this is or not, but wanted to pass along to you info from an article in the health section of the LA Times this morning. It quoted an Oakland-based environmental group, The Center for Environmental Health that “filed lawsuits late last month against several lunchbox manufacturers and various retailers who sell the products.” The article talks about the discovery of lead in “excess of federal safety standards” in some soft vinyl lunchboxes. Don’t know if you can access the article on the internet. It does reference the website for the group, www.cehca.org.
The article itself, I discover, is here.
The Center for Environmental Health (CEH) announced it is filing lawsuits today against makers and retailers of soft vinyl lunch boxes that can expose children to harmful levels of lead. The Center has also notified several other companies of violations under California?s toxics law Proposition 65 (Prop 65) for lunch boxes with high lead levels. The lawsuits and violation notices against companies including Toys ‘R’ Us, Warner Brothers, DC Comics, Time Warner, Walgreens, and others involve many lunch boxes featuring beloved children?s characters including Superman, Tweety Bird, Powerpuff Girls, and Hamtaro. The level of lead in one lunch box, an Angela Anaconda box made by Targus International, tested at 56,400 parts per million (ppm) of lead, more than 90 times the 600 ppm legal limit for lead in paint in children’s products.
Hmm. Katherine does, indeed, have a soft vinyl lunchbox (Disney Princesses, inherited from Meredith the girls next door, made in China by Zap designs of 100% pure PVC).
Okay, reality check one: Vinyl lunchboxes are not paint. The point of restrictions of lead in paint in kids’ products is because paint chips and kids eat paint chips and thus ingest lead.
Granted, we are talking about a lunchbox, and CEH is quick to say it’s basically the same thing:
In most cases, the highest lead levels were found in the lining of lunch boxes, where lead could come into direct contact with food. Lead is known to be harmful to children even in minute amounts, as it can impair brain development and cause other behavioral and developmental problems. Children may be exposed to lead from lunch boxes when they eat food that has been stored in them. Handling the lunchboxes just before eating could also be an exposure risk.
That’s right — kids may be at risk from even touching their PVC lunchboxes.
Um …
Lead is not good, sure, but, uh … despite CEH seeming to be a legit organization (a quick Google doesn’t find any specific criticism of them), I don’t find myself desperately planning on running out tonight to get a replacement lunchbox for her any time soon. Well, except that her present one doesn’t have enough room for her sandwich case and her thermos, so we’ve been planning on eventually finding a replacement.
The CPSC has a report on PVC, lead, and children’s toys. In particular, it did testing not just for the presence of lead in things (as the CEH seems to have done), but on exposure risks (i.e., whether kids would be exposed to said lead). The results would seem to be applicable here, at least to this lay person.