by hilbert42 | 2025-06-22 14:19:32+00:00
I'm fed up hearing about lead contamination, so let me try and put this into perspective.

Zinc galvanizing generally only has lead in it as a impurity and it's in pretty small amounts (zinc and lead are often mined together so completely separating the two is expensive (one has to be mindful of the costs)). That said, there are some few exceptions where tiny amounts of lead are used as a wetting agent.

This obsession with lead contamination really has gone too far when we start worrying about the tiny amount of lead in galvanizing. It's on a par with the obsession with the harmless amount of thiomersal in vaccines (I know, I'll never convince the unconvinced).

Look at it this way, zinc is harder than lead thus it's harder to rub off than lead—so it traps any lead that might be there. Given that the galvanizing on this 80+ year old bucket is still intact, how much lead has it shead in the past 80+ years? Answer: stuff all!

Consider this: large parts of the world have buildings still covered in lead paint and that lead will be still hanging around for hundreds of years to come. And there's one hell of a lot of it. Some years ago I removed the flaking paint from my house before repainting it and I could hardly lift the buckets they were so heavy from the lead. Anyone in an old house that's not had every ounce of lead paint removed would get orders of magnitude more lead in their bodies from the paint than from my galvanized bucket. Moreover, just removing the paint will spread lead about no matter how careful one is. Is that residual lead relevant? Well, it depends on many factors, the fact is you can't remove every trace of it no matter how hard you try. Also remember lead paint sheds lead as an aerosol—lead dust, galvanizing does not.

Lead is everywhere in the environment, in soil, in eves and attics—everywhere thanks to that ratbag Thomas Midgley Jr. and his tetraethyllead in gasoline. Lead from gasoline is still everywhere and isn't going away anytime soon.

Again, I'd suggest the average person would absorb orders of magnitude more lead from that source than they would from our old galvanized bucket.

I'm not finished yet, what about all that lead in building damp courses, in roofs, in church leadlight windows, etc., and in some places it's still used for water pipes. There's even lead in Flint's water supply.

Moreover, lead is still being used in buildings, especially in roofs where old lead is being replaced with new. Rain oxidizes the lead and the runoff continues to contaminate the soils and waterways.

Remember the fire in Notre Dame in Paris where hundreds of tons of lead melted and collapsed onto the cathedral floor. Well, that lead wasn't replaced with some safer material but rather new lead installed in exactly the same way as it was centuries ago.

No, that's still not all. For around a hundred years until only several decades ago fruit trees, especially apple and pear trees, were sprayed with the insecticide lead arsenate (lead hydrogen arsenate, PbHAsO4) to protect against codling moth and such. And as it's an inorganic chemical the double whammy of both lead and arsenic will be in the soils of thousands of orchards indefinitely (as a kid I used to spray our own apple trees with the stuff).

Oh, and there's much more, crystal drinking glasses, car batteries, lead in solder, and so on.

Lead is an important industrial metal and it's not going away anytime soon—we just have to get used to it being around us in the environment and in industry.

That's not to say it's not dangerous especially so to children. Nevertheless, we have to put this ubiquitous contamination into perspective, we have to channel our efforts where it's most effective—and that's not worrying about the miniscule amount of lead locked up in galvanizing.

What truly pisses me off is that the lead poisoning problem has been known about for millennia, since Roman times in fact, and yet so little has been done since the industrial age to protect people—ensure proper safety protocols are in place when working with lead, etc.

The trouble has always been that lead's industrial and economic value has always outweighed its dangers—that is, its perceived dangers which have changed over time. Whilst, today, we are more conscious of its dangers than in the past that should have been the situation well over a century ago.

There was absolutely no excuse for Midgley's tetraethyllead in gasoline as the dangers of lead were well known at the time.

By the mid Nineteenth Century the problem of lead poisoning was so well known that elders were teaching their kids of the dangers. No, this isn't hearsay, here's the evidence: download the PDF version of the 1858 edition of The Boy's Book of Industrial Information by Elisha Noyce from the Open Library: openlibrary.org/books/OL24144198M/The_boy%27s_book_of_industrial_information.

At the bottom of p57 is a discussion on the uses and preparation of white lead. On p58 is a statement that I find remarkable for the time (167 years ago), it's just as applicable now as it was then:

"White lead is a very poisonous substance, and produces the disease called painters’ colic, when taken into the system in minute quantities and for a long time, so that all who have much to do with this dangerous substance, as house-painters and artists, should be extremely careful that their hands are well washed frequently, and especially before going to meals."

And that's just a warning for boys—what else did the Establishment know about lead poisoning at that time? Much more I'd bet.

What's truly outrageous is that 68 years later Midgley and cohorts had the fucking hide and audacity to add tetraethyllead to gasoline in 1926. Moreover, by then not only that information from 1858 was known but also chemistry and medicine had moved on significantly. Clearly much more knowledge was known about lead poisoning by then. It's hard to believe they got away with putting lead in gas for so long. This is one of the great 20th Century disasters, as Wiki puts it:

"Throughout the sixty year period from 1926 to 1985, an estimated 20 trillion liters of leaded gasoline at an average lead concentration of 0.4 g/L were produced and sold in the United States alone, or an equivalent of 8 million tons of inorganic lead, [three quarters of which would have been emitted in the form of lead chloride and lead bromide]. Estimating a similar amount of lead to have come from other countries' emissions, a total of more than 15 million tonnes of lead may have been released into the atmosphere."

This isn't the only crime of this type, asbestos is a similar story but I can't cover that here.

As I said, lead is everywhere and eliminating it completely from the environment is impossible. The best we can do is to concentrate on things that truly matter, teaching kids the lesson from 1858, keeping them away from known large sources of lead such as flaky paint and so on. We haven't enough time in our lives to worry about sources that are in the noise.

Here's another perspective: it's said that there's enough naturally occurring arsenic in the average cubic meter of soil to kill a person but we don't worry about it because at that concentration it's not going to harm anyone.