California Classifies Lead "Hazardous Material"

[dannobee]

Tungsten, like the NASCAR teams! Almost twice as heavy as lead.

 

[captndale]

I've been thinking of requiring all the divers on my boat to use gold instead of lead. Retrieval of lost weight belts could become quite lucrative.

 

[Peter_C]

I've been thinking of requiring all the divers on my boat to use gold instead of lead. Retrieval of lost weight belts could become quite lucrative.

And since you will be supplying said weights as a free service to your customers, (20 lbs per person times say 10 divers is 200lbs of gold on board your boat. Gold is going for $14,821.44 per pound times 200 lbs is $2,964,288.00), how do you plan on keeping the pirates at bay? :hijackedthread: irate6: :

Those of you using depleted uranium, are you willing to hook a brother up?

 

[gert7to3]

The magic of the internet will let you order lead and have it shipped in. It could also be salvaged from old batteries, slightly dangerous, but no worse than melting yourself. Or contact an ophthalmic equipment sales office. All of those machines at your eyecare specialist's office require lead counter weights in the column stand next to the exam chair. You still might be able to obtain counter weights from equipment suppliers.

Another thought, how close are you to Mexico, Nevada or Oregon? Of course Oregon might have beat California to the current absurdity, but maybe not.

So this ties into all those signs you see in shopping centers about " The State of California has determined that materials known to be hazardous...blah, blah, blah"? Chicken Little is so omnipresent, you just don't know what to be careful of.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

California is one state I really have no deisre to go back to. Too many stupid rules and regulations. I have friends there and at times feel sorry that they have to put up with the whackjobs that seem to be drawn to the place.

 

[paddler3d]

The dangers of lead have been greatly exaggerated. The thing is, a person really has to work hard to get to enough lead in their system to pose a hazard.

Until I see people gnawing on lead weights on a regular basis, I just don't think I'll regard them as a public health hazard.

Lead's pretty much the same stuff whether one lives in the boonies or is one of them genius city slicker types.

Well, why don't you come to Baltimore and meet the abundance of kids here that have permanent damage from lead. That lead is not coming from lead weights, it is coming from the lead paint in all the old homes around here. It is called lead dust.

A person does not really have to work to get lead poisioning.

Here is a question...if California has banned lead, what they hell are they going to use for car batteries as stuff? I know they have Gel and AGM batteries, but aren't most car batteries lead?

 

[Peter_C]

California is one state I really have no deisre to go back to. Too many stupid rules and regulations. I have friends there and at times feel sorry that they have to put up with the whackjobs that seem to be drawn to the place.

I will agree to a point...then I strongly disagree. Pretty much everything smog related on a vehicle comes from C.A.R.B. which is California Air Resource Board. We here in California have been leading the way in automotive vehicle emission reductions which IS a good thing.

Go to Mexico and you will appreciate California a lot more.

FWIW I am proud to do my best in protecting the environment. Much more so than protecting people from stupidity. Darwin does need to work a little harder on some people now due to laws protecting them from themselves

 

[captain]

Maybe what you don't realize, living out in the boonies as you apparently do, is that everything that goes onto the street or into the gutter here eventually finds its way into California's coastal waterways via the storm drain system. Further, there are over 2000 water bodies in California that have been identified as being impaired for heavy metals, lead being one of them. So eliminating what is undoubtably a source of pollution is not "insanity", it is California once again leading the way towards responsible environmental stewardship.

And where do the heavy metals come from in the first place, does the tooh fairy bring them to earth. Caleeforneia is dying a slow death because of all the waco regulations they dream up.

 

[paddler3d]

And where do the heavy metals come from in the first place, does the tooh fairy bring them to earth. Caleeforneia is dying a slow death because of all the waco regulations they dream up.

Industry my man.

We're all going to die a slow death if we don't do something.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

The theory is that the wheel weights that fall off of cars (estimated to be 500,000 lbs/yr) get "ground down by passing vehicles," then the lead gets washed down storm drains.

They've been banned in the EU since 2005, btw.

I don't have a dog in this fight, so I really don't care one way or the other, but I did see a few blue rockfish rushing over to pick at the lead pellets out of a rotted soft weight that I was scavenging.

Lead shotgun shells were also banned because of the animal ingestion problem.

Lead shot is banned pretty much anywhere you find migratory waterfowl due to the tendency for water fowl to ingest the pellets from the bottom of lakes and ponds where they end up.

Personally, the theory that a lead weight will remain on a freeway long enough to get ground up isjust not going to hold water. Lead weights quickly end up along side the road on the shoulder and soon after in the ditch, so if traffic grinding them up is a problem they need to ban driving in the ditches in CA.

Across the country we tend to do the wrong things in the name of the environment. For example, we had a massive failure at 3 mile island and the result was a very small release of radiation. The response was to cancel numerous planned nuclear power plants all over the country and we replaced them with coal powered plants. That single over reaction 30 years ago created massive amounts of acid rain as well as ensured the release of all kinds of wonderful heavy metal emissions including lead and other wonderful things like sulfur, arsenic and cyanide. You could also argue that the fleeing from nuclear energy to coal has greatly exacerbated global warming.

But this is America by God and the average American voter demands a response to all perceived threats and the American politician delivers (to ensure re-election). What most people fail to ever consider is that a visible or quick reponse is seldom the right response - they just go away happy once some stupid law has been passed to make them feel good.

In regard to lead weights, consider this. Lead melts at around 650 degrees and as such is takes comparatively little energy to melt and cast. A great deal of lead wheel weights are also recycled - either directly in tire shops or by being thing sold back to salvage yards (the percentage that fell off is very, very small).

Steel is another matter as it takes much more energy to process. So every wheel weight that CA gets rid of will have to be replaced with a steel weight made from steel from a blast furnace with a great deal more cost in terms of energy. Then there is the basic inefficiency of manufacturing something to replace an item that was already perfectly usable in the first place. (Mmuch like expending huge amounts of energy to make a new fuel efficent car to replace a slightly less efficient one - it results in a net loss of energy over the normal life of the car you replaced).

And don't forget, since we did away with most nuclear powerplants, that steel wheel weight will be manufactured with energy from coal fired powerplants, dumping more coal emission by products on people and the environment. But since CA is upwind of most of those plants, I suppose it is just not an issue for the CA voter with a green agenda.

Makes you wonder if they have ever considered the long term impact of the heavy metals, chemicals and envronmentally unfriendly materials used in all the hybrid cars?