March 2008

Lead Backpacks

By Heather World

Add backpacks, vinyl raincoats and school-issued bookbags to the growing list of children’s products contaminated with lead, a substance proven harmful to human health, especially to the young.

The findings come not from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the federal agency charged with protecting Americans from hazardous products. Instead, it was consumer watchdog the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) that tested four backpacks with popular characters like Dora the Explorer and found lead levels of up to 9,100 parts per million (ppm), more than 15 times the legal limit of 600 ppm for lead in paint.

A mom discovered the high concentrations of lead and phthalates, another harmful compound that’s used to make plastic more flexible, in her son’s school-issued ABC Book Program bookbag, which is provided as part of the Take Home Book Program that caters to San Francisco’s kindergarteners, first, and second graders.

Exposure to lead, a naturally occurring element that’s a reliable stabilizer for vinyl, can retard the growth of the central nervous system and brain, permanently damaging children’s health. State and federal governments limit the amount of lead, as well as certain phthalates, that can be used in products.   California’s Proposition 65, The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, requires manufacturers to warn buyers when toxic substances are present in their merchandise.  Advocacy groups and individuals have used the law to sue manufacturers and distributors who don’t comply.

Ellison Folk, the mother of an Alvarado Elementary School second-grader, smelled something odd – that new car smell – when she pulled her son’s weekly reading bag out of his backpack late last year.  “I took it out of the backpack and smelled it and said, ‘Holey moley, that smells like phthalates!” said Folk, an attorney at Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, an environmental law firm.  Folk sent the bag to a lab used by her firm to be tested:  her son’s newer version of the bag contained 4,800 ppms of lead. The phthalate reading came back at 2.9 percent DEHP – a phthalate that’s been classified as a male reproductive toxin – nearly 30 times higher than the percentage allowed by San Francisco in certain toys for children under three.  California adopted a similar ban that will go into effect next year.

Additional San Francisco Unified School District and CEH testing confirmed Folk’s results, prompting the District to instruct school principals to pull the bags. Sample tests of older bags, used by kindergarteners and first graders, came back clear, said Gentle Blythe, the District’s Public Outreach and Communications Director.  Nonetheless, the District is not releasing the bags until it conducts additional tests.  “We want to stay on the side of caution,” Blythe said. The District is asking schools to find alternative ways of sending the books home, and schools are devising their own solutions, she said.  Meanwhile, the District is working with Silver Giving, the foundation that funds the program, to see if new safe bags can be substituted.

Last November CEH tests of a Disney-licensed “High School Musical” backpack found more than 13,000 ppm of lead; and tests of a vinyl “Mine Eat Trax” child’s lunchbox from Office Depot indicated the product contained 2,500 ppm.  The nonprofit also tested a Coleman-made rain poncho for youth, finding 17,500 ppm of lead, nearly 600 times the 30 ppm limit agreed to in a 2005 legal settlement with another poncho maker.  

Just as it did when it found alarmingly high lead levels in children’s lunchboxes in 2004, CEH initiated legal action against product manufacturers and retailers.   Caroline Cox, CEH’s Research Director, said the organization sent the required 60-day notice of a Proposition 65 violation, the first step towards a lawsuit, late last year. Attorneys for both sides are negotiating a possible settlement.

Cox is confident the two sides will come to an agreement.  “That is definitely our intention and mostly we have success with that,” she said. The 2004 threat of a lawsuit led many lunchbox manufacturers to voluntarily reformulate their products with less lead.

Folk has also found the threat of lawsuits to be an effective curb on lead-filled products.  Given headlines about lead-laden toys, Folk was surprised to find the substance in school-issued bags.  “I was kind of annoyed it took a parent who has a special expertise, when the company who is making these and selling them to the district should be responsible for insuring quality of its product,” she said.

The bags’ distributor, KL&P Marketing, was caught by surprise, said Jennifer Katz.  

“We are talking with our suppliers to see what can be done,” Katz said. “We want to do the right thing, absolutely.”  Meanwhile, the company continues to test its products and investigate the matter, she said.

Despite the media hoopla about lead toys, paint and dust remain the primary sources of lead poisoning for children, especially for families who live in old houses, said Neil Gendel, Project Director of the Healthy Children Organizing Project.  “Younger kids are more likely to get exposed to leaded dust in their homes than from lead toys; though exposure to any lead is not good,” he said.

Gendel’s organization works to protect young children in low-income and minority communities from preventable diseases caused by environmental hazards.  He urges worried parents to have their children tested for lead poisoning, though he cautions about test kits sold in stores, saying they’re only good for testing tableware.  “Most doctors will say that 10 ppm is the bright line for concern, but if the Bush Administration had not forced the CDC to do otherwise, that bright line would be 5 ppm,” he said.

Gendel hopes parents, the CEH and others will force retailers and manufacturers to only sell toxin-free toys and household cleaners, as well as safe personal care products for infants, toddlers and their mothers.

Meanwhile, public outcry has spurred Congress into action. At the end of last year the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Consumer Product Safety Modernization Act, which calls for increased funding for a better-defined CPSC. The Senate will debate a similar bill later this year.

Despite repeated incidents of lead-containing children’s products entering the United States, mostly from China, CPSC Acting Chairwoman Nancy Nord, a Bush Administration appointee, has said she doesn’t want a bigger budget for fear of bloating the government.  In response Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other U.S. representatives have called for her resignation, claiming that the Commission has failed to protect the public. So far, Nord has refused to step down.

 

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