Household cleaners are safe for lead dust removal
Government guidelines will no longer recommend the use of lead-specific cleaners or phosphate detergents.
For close to a decade, the federal government has recommended that workers use lead-specific cleaning products or the harsh detergent trisodium phosphate to clean houses contaminated with lead dust. However, scientists never adequately checked to see whether special cleaning agents were actually needed. Research posted today on ES&T’s Research ASAP website (10.1021/es050803s) reports that any general cleaner will effectively remove lead-contaminated dust. In response, the federal government plans to change its lead abatement guidelines, which will slightly lower cleaning costs and help keep environmentally unfriendly phosphate products from entering the environment.
“Our study found that there is really no difference between all the different types of cleaners,” says the study’s lead author Roger Lewis, director of the environmental health research lab at St. Louis University’s School of Public Health. “The problem now is that we need to disseminate this information.”
For decades, scientists have known that lead causes neurological problems in young children. And a new study by Argonne National Laboratory finds that lead poisoning may have been the cause of death and decades of suffering by composer Ludwig van Beethoven. In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) established guidelines on reducing hazards from exposure to lead-based paints, says Peter Ashley, an environmental scientist with the agency.
“Most of the work being done doesn’t involve paint removal; it’s normally just stabilizing the paint in place,” says Ashley.
On the basis of the best available evidence, HUD recommended the use of lead-specific cleaning agents or trisodium phosphate. “It wasn’t a requirement, but the guidelines carried weight and became the de facto procedures for contractors carrying out work,” he says. In fact, these guidelines are now being followed in cities, counties, and states across the U.S.
A study by HUD in 2002 found that about 38 million housing units in the U.S. contain some lead paint. More significantly, around 24 million housing units were found to have significant levels of lead from dust, soil, or paint. The U.S. currently has a little over 100 million housing units.
For the study, Lewis and colleagues tested how well various detergents removed lead dust from three different building materials: linoleum, wallpaper, and pine veneer. First, lead dust was embedded into the material at levels typically found in older U.S. houses. To ensure a uniform pressure while cleaning, the researchers used a robotic arm to wipe the surface. While finding that no detergent worked better than any other, the authors also discovered that linoleum and pine veneer were easier to clean.
Ashley says that his agency funded the study to test the efficiency of different products and because phosphate cleaners are known to cause algal blooms after they wash into streams and rivers. He says that not using phosphate cleaners in the first place is the best way to ensure that they don’t become a problem in the environment.
“The EPA allows lead hazard control work to be treated as regular construction debris,” says Ashley. “So it doesn’t have to be handled as a hazardous waste.”
According to a report published by the U.S. Geological Survey, phosphorus-containing detergents were first recognized as a water pollutant in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, Congress set up an industry–government task force to look into the problem but never banned the products because of concerns that replacements were carcinogenic and could lead to birth defects. Nonetheless, industry voluntarily chose in 1970 to limit the phosphorus content of cleaners to 8.7%.
Although federal laws were never passed in the U.S., Canada regulated phosphorus levels to 2.2% in 1972. Today, more than two dozen states and the District of Columbia limit the percentage of phosphorus allowed in cleaning detergents, although these regulations usually apply only to domestic laundry detergents.
Ashley says that new HUD guidelines to be released in the next few months will no longer recommend either phosphate detergent or lead-specific cleaning agents. Lewis says that the use of lead-specific cleaning agents has created a cottage industry for products that seem to perform no better than those you might already find under you kitchen sink. Switching to regular household products probably won’t save a great deal on total construction, but lead-specific cleaners can cost 4–5 times more than products that can be picked up from the local market.
“People are making money selling this stuff, but there’s no proof it works,” Lewis says. Noting that he could not find any studies backing up the claims that these cleaners actually work, he added, “Let’s see their data.”
