July 19, 2007 | Food & drink, Health, Shopping
School shopping time is just around the corner. We’ll all be heading out the shops to buy pencil boxes, glue sticks, new shoes, and … cha-ching! … lunch boxes too. But as it turns out, the vinyl in many lunchboxes contains lead. Many lunchboxes use vinyl either on the inside or the outside, and a frightening - yet decreasing - number of them contain lead.
As far as I see it, any amount of lead is too much. But when some lunchboxes tested had amounts of lead 90% higher than the limit for lead paint, that’s a real problem. Here’s a PDF that tells more about it. In children, exposure to lead can to decreased IQ, stunted growth, ADD, kidney damage, along with other behavioral and developmental problems. That’s some pretty bad stuff. The younger the children, the more susceptible they are to lead poisoning. My little girl - we’ll call her Bean - has been using a potential deathtrap regular lunchbox for a year. And her little brother - Little Man - will be starting preschool this year too.
As for me, I’ll be buying a couple lead-free lunchboxes this year. Go ahead, google it. You’ll find some good choices.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
The URI to TrackBack this entry is:
http://broomhuggers.com/2007/07/19/lead-in-your-lunch-box/trackback/
