Why should I care about lead
What is lead?
Lead is a naturally occurring toxic metal that has been used in many products. It can be found throughout the environment, including air, soil, and water. The use of lead dramatically rose during the 20th century. Leaded gasoline was the standard, and lead was widely used in house paint and plumbing. Lead is nonbiodegradable and remains present in the air and soil.
Deteriorating lead paint, which is susceptible to chipping and peeling, can cause lead poisoning. Young children are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, primarily from inhaling dust or consuming paint chips. Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health and development by causing:
- Damage to the brain and nervous system
- Slowed growth and development
- Learning and behavior problems
- Hearing and speech problems
There is no cure to lead poisoning, and the effects are irreversible. Studies have linked just small amounts of lead exposure to serious and irreversible health problems. Most at risk are toddlers just learning to crawl around their homes. Worst yet, it is difficult to assess adverse outcomes of lead poisoning on a child’s health until they are at least six years old. Though studies have shown that the percentage of children experiencing elevated blood lead levels has dropped considerably over the years in California, in 2017 nearly 10,000 children tested with elevated blood lead levels. This represented an increase of over 1,000 children since 2015 despite a decline in the number of children tested.
Although lead paint was banned for residential use in the United States in 1978, it is still present in millions of homes in California and continues to be the leading cause of childhood lead poisoning in the state. All homes built before 1978 are presumed to contain lead paint.
While a combination of the ban on lead paint and a 1992 federal law regulating lead paint has significantly reduced lead poisoning rates in the last forty years, an estimated 24 million homes, about a quarter of all U.S. housing, still contain lead-based paint hazards. These 24 million homes continue to constitute a major public health and equity concern, and they largely consist of older housing stock in dense urban areas with residents that are typically low-income and people of color. People are often unaware of the dangers of lead paint (even though the law mandates that home sellers and/or landlords provide this information from the outset), and even where knowledgeable, residents may not have the resources to abate a lead paint hazard.
The trend in lead paint regulatory policy has traditionally skewed towards secondary prevention. Under this model, the identification of a child with elevated blood lead levels generally triggers an official housing inspection and/or a subsequent abatement order. To better combat this problem, experts and advocates agree that emphasis should be placed on the adoption of primary prevention approaches to lead paint poisoning that support proactive inspections for lead paint deterioration in homes and addresses any identified hazards before children are poisoned.
How can I get my child tested for lead poisoning?
Litigation
Landmark lead paint case
In 2000, the County of Santa Clara filed a landmark lawsuit in Santa Clara County Superior Court—County of Santa Clara, et al. v. Atlantic Richfield Company, et al, No. CV788657 —seeking to hold former lead-based paint manufacturers responsible for promoting residential use of lead-based paint despite their knowledge that the product was highly toxic, especially to children. The County was later joined in the litigation by nine other cities and counties: the counties of Alameda, Los Angeles, Monterey, San Mateo, Solano, and Ventura; the City and County of San Francisco; and the cities of Oakland and San Diego. Together, these cities and counties encompass about half of the older housing stock in California.
In 2014, after a six-week trial, the Santa Clara County Superior Court ruled those three former lead-based paint manufacturers—The Sherwin-Williams Company, ConAgra Grocery Products, and NL Industries—were liable for knowingly marketing this toxic product. The final ruling held that these three companies had created a public nuisance by concealing the dangers of lead and found that they had pursued a campaign against regulation of lead while actively promoting it for use in homes, despite knowing that lead-based paint was highly toxic. The court ordered the defendants to provide the funds needed to clean up lead-based paint inside homes built before 1978 in the ten cities and counties.
In 2017, the Court of Appeal upheld the Superior Court’s decision but limited the defendants’ liability to cleaning up homes built before 1951. The California Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court each declined to review the Court of Appeal’s precedent-setting decision.
After the Court of Appeal’s decision, the parties continued to litigate issues related to the final judgment, which would have included significant limitations on the jurisdictions’ expenditure of abatement funds. In July 2019, the parties reached a settlement resolving all claims in the case. Under the settlement agreement, the three former manufacturers of lead paint-based are required to pay $305 million to the ten public entities that prosecuted the case to address lead-based paint-related hazards in their jurisdictions. The settlement ended the threat of further litigation, removed restrictions on the jurisdictions’ use of the funds, and gives the cities and counties the flexibility to create programs appropriately tailored to the needs of their communities without the threat that settlement funds could revert back to the defendants.
The ten cities and counties divided the settlement funds based on the number of homes with lead-based paint in each jurisdiction. Based on its relative percentage of affected housing, Santa Clara County will receive approximately $16.8 million in abatement funds (after accounting for costs and attorneys’ fees). As required by the settlement agreement, defendants are paying these funds to the County in annual installments through 2025. Through an inter-agency working group, the ten prosecuting cities and counties continue to collaborate on developing and implementing effective and equitable lead abatement programs to remove lead hazards in their communities.
This $305 million award will make the lead-based paint hazard identification and remediation work under the California settlement the largest in the nation within a single state. The settlement marks a significant opportunity to protect millions of children in the years to come by removing lead hazards from their homes and home-based daycares and preventing lead poisoning at its source.
Learn more about Lead Safe Homes Program and how to protect your family