EPA to seek ban on lead tire weights

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2 years ago I let a $32,000 contract to reroof a church. They were using an elastomeric material as flashing. Run it up the masonery, screw a plastic strip to the top and caulk. So far so good.
 
I wonder if part of the lead problem is mining it.

In south east MO, there are/were all sorts of lead mines and of course now there are higher incidences of lead related "complications."

Folks are turning up with higher concentrations of lead in their blood. Not just the miners, but in households near/over the lead mines.

So I doubt the problem is in how lead is used and kids eating tire weights they find on the side of the road. The problem is what does lead mining do to the surrounding community and environment.
 
There is no reason to use lead in any of the applications it has been used in. Other materials are superior. Lead was just used for years because of low cost. No longer. Does your Walleye know if you are using an iron sinker? Tires can be better balanced using polymer or ceramic dyna beads than any lead wheel weights.

Keeping lead out of the environment is just good common sense.
 
I don't see a problem with using lead substitutes for wheel weights and fishing sinkers. However, going to 100% lead-free solder in electronics is going to cause problems (Tin whiskers). I have to deal with arcing problems caused by lead free solder every day at work. I think it would be better to have good recycling programs in place for used electronics rather than to have a complete lead prohibition. Even if buried in a landfill not much, if any, lead leaches out of used electronics.
 
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We've been reduced lead for years. ROHS has been the order of the day in my business since what 2005 or 2006?

We can't even put non-ROHS parts in newer machines that are ROHS compliant.
 
Metal halide lamps are one of the parts with which we're having trouble. The lamp tip contact is made of solder. The old leaded solder beaded well and formed a nice, rounded contact surface. The new lead free solder just won't cooperate and forms a flat and sometimes jagged contact surface.

The odd thing is, the arc tubes of both the old and new lamps contain small balls of mercury. According to ROHS, the mercury is fine, but the lamp can't contain lead solder. I suppose that makes sense to some bureaucrat somewhere.
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With our widespread electronic waste problem, and few things being worth repairing, any thing reducing reliability has to be bad for the environment.
 
I know there are already people that support ban of anything, but is it just me that think there are people that are against ban of anything?
 
I'm all for "sensible" measures.

Banning Lead in petrol made sense (but then Sydney developed 3 times the OH&S allowable concentrations of benzene in the air).

Lead shot bans in swampy areas make sense (sometimes)...wheelweights, not IMO.
 
Originally Posted By: rszappa1
back when I fished alot we used a weight called a split shot...are they still made out of lead?


Lead split shot is being replaced with a split shot made out of pure tin. Pure tin is soft and malleable like lead, so it can be pinched on and off of fishing line just like the old lead split shot. The only minor disadvantages of using tin is that the sinkers have to be a little bigger for the same weight, and it's a little more expensive. Worth the trade off IMO.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
I know there are already people that support ban of anything, but is it just me that think there are people that are against ban of anything?


No, not just you. A lot of people fall into the habit of supporting whatever their "team" supports, and opposing whatever the "enemy" supports, no matter what.

There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn't use materials that cause damage. One lead weight sitting on the side of the road isn't going to hurt anything. The problem is in the aggregate, over time.

Someone said the roads aren't sitting on water. That's true, and not true. The road sits on dirt, but there is groundwater below that. And what sits next to the roads? Cornfields. A tiny amount of lead leeches off the weights every time it rains. Some of that lead gets into the ground water, some of it is taken up by the crops, which is then taken up by the people who eat it. Over time, the levels of lead slowly increase. Maybe it won't hurt most people, but it will change things at the margins. There will be kids who would have been fine, but who aren't because they got exposed to just a little bit more lead and ended up getting sick. There will be A LOT of people who will have no acute symptoms, but who will have generally lower IQ scores and be generally less able to learn. Over the span of time and the nation, this will harm us.

It's the tragedy of the commons. We get no direct signals that what we are doing is harmful, so we keep doing it. And so does everyone else. And eventually, the cumulative effect of all of those behaviors builds up and cause harm to everyone.

Same thing with CO2. We need it in the air. It is important, it keeps the planet habitable. But too much will cause problems. We can't control natural sources, but that's ok because natural sources tend to balance out with other natural process. Every time we exhale or flatulate, there is a plant or a microbe somewhere who will use it. But the problem is in unnatural sources. If we are pumping so much co2 out that it upsets the balance, there will be trouble. So we need to find a way to not cause harm, by not pumping out as much as we reasonably can.

(As well as planting as many plants as we can. I'm a big believer in that side of "conservation". Mayor Daley in Chicago created a green roof on top of the city hall. The plants up there absorb a lot of the heat and reduce the need for cooling the building. And they eat up a significant portion of the co2 that the building generates (not directly, of course). Things like that hurt no one, and help a little bit.

(As an example, remember that guy in Ukraine that was running for president and got poisoned with benzine? He got one big dose, and it hurt him. But if he'd have gotten a series of much smaller doses, but over time, he would have been a goner. He would have had far less poison in his system in total, but the ways he got it would have been bad.)
 
Yushchenko was poisoned with a dioxin known as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). I wouldn't think of it as generic benzine.
 
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