The roofing industry might put 50,000 grams of lead on your roof, slowly dissolving into groundwater around your house from the acidic rainfall and nobody bats an eyelid.
Shoot kilogrammes of lead shot or lead bullets all over national parks and mountains feeding drinking water to cities of millions of people. Go ahead.
Yet use 0.001 grams of lead in a compound to make electronics work, encapsulated in plastic, and suddenly everyone is worried about toxicity.
We are dumb. We should not worry about tiny quantities with big benefits when we haven't yet eliminated huge quantities with small benefits.
To be fair even my 70 year old father has misgivings about using lead shot anymore, and he use to chew on lead like it was gum as a kid. So attitudes about lead have been changing.
Lead in electronics is a pretty dumb thing to worry about though when it is such a small proportion and nobody is licking raw electronics.
Politics -- the bias for the old vs the new. It's taken forever for them to get the lead out of general aviation fuel in the most dangerous, bioavailable and highly dispersed forms there is even though (perhaps because) general aviation is a dying business that could reasonably be taken behind the woodshed and shot (with a lead bullet!) to make way for new industries like drones.
On the other hand, new and dynamic industries can bear the burden of switching to more ecological materials.
The roofing industry might put 50,000 grams of lead on your roof, slowly dissolving into groundwater around your house from the acidic rainfall and nobody bats an eyelid.
Shoot kilogrammes of lead shot or lead bullets all over national parks and mountains feeding drinking water to cities of millions of people. Go ahead.
Yet use 0.001 grams of lead in a compound to make electronics work, encapsulated in plastic, and suddenly everyone is worried about toxicity.
We are dumb. We should not worry about tiny quantities with big benefits when we haven't yet eliminated huge quantities with small benefits.
To be fair even my 70 year old father has misgivings about using lead shot anymore, and he use to chew on lead like it was gum as a kid. So attitudes about lead have been changing.
Lead in electronics is a pretty dumb thing to worry about though when it is such a small proportion and nobody is licking raw electronics.
Politics -- the bias for the old vs the new. It's taken forever for them to get the lead out of general aviation fuel in the most dangerous, bioavailable and highly dispersed forms there is even though (perhaps because) general aviation is a dying business that could reasonably be taken behind the woodshed and shot (with a lead bullet!) to make way for new industries like drones.
On the other hand, new and dynamic industries can bear the burden of switching to more ecological materials.
Still, both lead shot and lead in building are being banned here in the EU. It will probably be banned completely in time.