Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything

those cases are usually what's called out as when it becomes unsafe.

It's safe as long as it's on the wall but chipping needs to be addressed and for sanding/demo proper PPE/followup cleaning needs to happen. If you maintain the surface you're fine as far as any existing testing shows, usually you want to just remove any loose chips, clean the surface and paint over it so you don't need to deal with more in depth remediation.

If you have particularly destructive kids/pets/people around you may want to do more.

Zamac alloys do not contain lead, except as a tiny amount of impurity (because we don't know how to completely remove it). Zamac is often confused for the more general "pot metal", which is a anything goes if it melts in a pot (that is on your kitchen stove!), lead often is in these, but the goal of people who use pot metal is cheap and don't worry about quality, such alloys make be as much as 50% lead because nobody cares (there is an upper limit, but defined more by it will no longer make it past the warranty).

Please keep your terms correct. Zamac is a very useful thing to look for in hobby metal casting because you can buy ingots for fairly cheap that will melt in your kitchen (I would still do it outside) and have useful known properties thus ensuring good results. Pot metal is a low quality product that you could also work with in your kitchen, but you have no idea what the results will be.

I needed leaded solder recently too for a vintage audio project, I'm in the UK and while it was a bit of a faff to track it down initially I was able to order some locally. Might get better shipping buying from the UK next time!

In France we have obligatory 'diagnostic' of house sold, including many thing like asbestos but also lead paint.

We use a 20 000€ machine with radioactive material to measure the amount of lead, so not everyone can get it but you can definitely ask a technician to do it.

Cost around 300€, depends of the house size and he checks every single part of every single room that can contain lead paint. Very tedious.

I know that the same laboratory we send asbestos for measurement also did lead measurement.

If you got only a few place you are concerned, you could scrape it yourself and sent it to them.

Otherwise it's considered that lead in paint is only dangerous when the paint is old and it fall down, so that kids could eat it or if you're repainting the window and you scrub it without mask.

To my knowledge, the lead pipe are much more dangerous because there is nothing you can do. It's all city property and even if you don't drink city water, you still get poisoning from factory and restaurant using that water to make food.

Lumping up all "Europe" into one is quite misleading. For example in France when buying/selling a property a detailed lead investigation performed by a professional is obligatory. To the level of what wall has what concentration. Plus all explanation of potential risks, etc.

How carefully you read and understand a report depends on multiple factors, but definitely there are many people in Europe that take lead paint seriously.

> nobody in Europe seems to take lead paint seriously

Do you live in an older property or do you think there might be a significant amount of lead-containing paint in your living/working environment?

(Not suggesting lead isn't a problem, but I've dealt with a bunch of much, much more toxic substances [full disclosure: PhD Chem])

FWIW, the UK banned lead paint over 30 years ago, lead water pipes 55 years ago, and leaded petrol 25 years ago.

There's a paper suggesting lead pollution may be approaching natural background levels https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i40/Lead-pollution-approache...

Surprising, since the EU near-total ban on lead.

I think this extends beyond lead. Americans love tests, and Europeans are more like the person that is scared of going to the doctor because who knows what they will find.

Was lead paint as widespread in Europe as it was in North America?

He's referring to glow fuel[1]. I would not suggest drinking it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_fuel

Small aircraft owners would happily pay a slight premium to get rid of leaded gas because doing so would eliminate the biggest avenue by which Karens complain about them.

The FAA is the big hurdle. IIRC they recently just approved some fuel as a replacement but I'm not sure if it was a "go start selling it" type of approval or if it's some sort of intermediary approval and there's further ring kissing to be done before people can actually buy it.

Uh, no. It's because when plane engines break they fall out of the sky onto things. They break when they aren't correctly modified to take the new fuel. It is not very realistic to mandate conversions for all of the (often quite old) planes today- like from manufacturers going out of business. It is not trivial to convert an engine, fuel system etc. and also meet the same performance so that things like stall and thrust and altitude are still accurate across the important ranges.

In practice, it's a choice between:

1. Banning or buying out older planes at not-insignificant cost 2. Swapping fuels and doing your best to get people to fix their planes, causing crashes 3. Playing it slow, requiring new planes to be compatible with lead-free fuel, building new lead-free infrastructure, and gradually encouraging people to transition

Currently we're doing 3 until it's determined that 1 is cheap enough to do. That said the FAA could certainly be doing more, but that's much more (IMO) on them not taking the issue seriously than on voters being appeased. Its a national agency, not the local school board.

Lead's symbol is Pb, from plumbum. Which is where the word plumb/plumbing comes from.