Get ready for lower crime rates! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesi...
My mom works for our local municipal government administering a HUD lead abatement grant. The state of lead contamination in many older homes in low income areas is just awful.
Is there any cheap way to test the quality of my water? I did some Googling around, looks like there are services that will do this for a fee but didn't look particularly affordable.
I recently did a full replacement of my lead-soldered water pipes in my 1970s home in Seattle. Despite how much people rave about how great the drinking water is in Seattle, many homes have older piping systems, which will test positive for lead in the drinking water. It was a very expensive and time-consuming project, but I am glad I did it. Unfortunately, many will not even know they are being exposed due to the clean water reports from the city.
What did you end up replacing it with?
I've done no research, but I wonder what the risk tradeoff is between a tiny amount of lead in contact with my drinking water (assuming copper pipes joined together with lead-based solder, not lead-free solder) versus the new plastic pipes that are becoming standard. I'm sure PEX is designed so that it doesn't leach plastic nastiness into the water, but I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that after a few decades it starts breaking down anyway and suddenly we have a whole new toxin in our drinking water and we need to replace half of the pipes in America again.
The dose makes the poison here.
How much lead is permissible before it’s bad? The answer is, very very very little.
In comparison, you get copper contamination from copper pipes (especially if the water is too acidic), however the body handles a little copper just fine. It doesn’t build up in the body unlike lead.
Then you’re left with plastics: PEX or PVC. As of yet, there’s some potential concerns with microplastics in general… but that is from all the tiny plastic particles found everywhere, not solid pieces of pipe. And there hasn’t really be any evidence that it causes any specific known issue. If it was some giant problem (like lead in drinking water!) then the magnitude of effect would be much more obvious.
I would assume they do leach microplastics and nanoplastics and require third party proof that they do not. From what I can find on the internet plastics leach micro/nanoplastics period. https://safepipingmatters.org/plastic-pipes-microplastics-im...
lead is extremely toxic even in small doses, microplastics are comparatively a non-issue.
Yeah, I can't believe this has to be said.
There is no indoor plumbing without tradeoffs. Copper, PVC, CPVC, PEX, etc all leach just different chemicals. Maybe copper with lead-free solder is best? Very expensive though
Replaced it with higher-end pex. Yes, there is a trade-off there, but to me the effects of lead over long periods of time are very scary. I also have a filter for our actual drinking water that is able to filter some micro plastics as well.
PEX isn’t new, it has been in use for at least 50 years by now
Before then, those of us with homes that aren't 100% rodent-proof forever have to factor in just how much mice and rats luuuuuv chewing on PEX hot water pipes. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/rodents-chew-pex-pipe/
PEX is easy to work with and cheap up front. The cost and risk are shifted onto the future owners.
My copper pipes have with some regularity gotten small pinholes that blossom from tiny drips into tiny high-pressure jets. (E.g.: https://whyrepipe.com/blog/what-causes-pinhole-leaks-in-copp...)
The longer I have a home, the more I realize every thing has its gotcha's.
If you have rodents inside your walls or attic, you have a major issue unrelated to the PEX. Also, to my knowledge, the colored PEX is the main culprit. Clear variants aren’t nearly as “tasty”.
Either way, if you have rodents inside… that’s its own issue.
Here in Europe, PEX is perfectly normal. The key difference is that we build our homes out of brick and mortar or outright solid concrete instead of wood, cardboard and glasswool, so pests have it much, much more difficult to cause damage.
Doesn’t Paris have an annual rat culling since their population of rats is like 10mil? And London is almost as bad as New York (which is also mostly stonework). The material hardly matters for rodents, as stone will make its own holes over time for them to get into, and the sewers in Europe are even older and in parts less maintained than the US.
Oh we do have rats but they live in the sewers and gutters where food waste ends up, not in the walls of our homes.
> we build our homes out of brick and mortar or outright solid concrete instead of wood
I mean yes, you chopped down your forests millennia ago ;).
You're going to find 'health problems' with every pipe material. Even stainless steel will contain trace amounts of lead or another toxic metal.
And if you have hard water, stainless steel will still oxidize (rust).
> You're going to find 'health problems' with every pipe material...
IIR, larger chemistry laboratories often use glass & quartz pipes to distribute distilled water. Though the direct costs of such a system are relatively high.
Copper pipes + lead free (silver) solder is also an option.
Yeah I'm too lazy to look up a source now, but I did look it up and both types of PEX will leech microplastics into your water.
It sounds like a big facepalm, and it kind of is, but it's not a crazy idea to filter your water at the taps: you probably only have 2-6 of them anyway. I'm a fan of the whole-home water filter, but yeah then you've gotta be confident about your pipes.
I'll take microplastics over lead any day.
The dose makes the poison.
I'd choose micro plastics vs an equivalent mass dose of lead.
If it was 1000x the amount of micro plastics vs lead it's maybe less obvious which is the less bad poison. I'd have to do some research at that point.
I think framing it this way it's obvious that lead is worse than micro plastics. But when you go from lead soldered copper pipes to PEX I don't know what the doses you get from each are.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just install an RO filtration system on your drinking water source at the sink? Then you get the benefits of RO drinking water and the cost is minuscule. You don’t drink from the toilets and showers and all that.
I support RO water filters. But consider not cooking with that water either. I’d just bite the bullet and eliminate the lead.
When you have an RO water filter (like I do), you just use that for cooking.
Only about a 20dB improvement for something that has a zero safe exposure level.
I find the zero safe level needlessly shock oriented.
Many things have no safe value but a low level is less likely to play a major role in a life than another risk.. Cars, guns, opioids, suicide, cancer, maybe the last two have a minor lead influence, mostly outweighed by alcohol.
you do realize that other things have a no safe value...opioids no doctor can predict which dose of opioid produces the addiction...opioids first use was for pain medication for those with terminal diseases
> you do realize that other things have a no safe value
You do realize I said exactly that. But we realize we are making statements that look like questions.
it's alarmism to say zero safe exposure. For example, you should limit your tuna per week, but you don't need to stop eating tuna.
The problem with heavy metals is that they're cumulative, but it's also impossible to avoid them completely, so minimization is the strategy.
-20db is 1/100th which is a dramatic improvement, at least for that threat source.
To be clear, everyone alive today is still on average multiple iq points dumber than they would have been had we not burned tetraethyl lead 50 years ago, even though it has been banned for quite a while. Lead is THAT toxic.
Any source for this? Most of the research I've seen with regards to lead and IQ is correlational and could be confounded by intelligence being correlated with income which is associated with living in places with less lead exposure.
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1825584397363589312
Basically the IQ gap between the lead exposed and non exposed has stayed the same even though the amount of lead in the bloodstream has dropped by orders of magnitude. So either the first part of lead exposure is 100x more damaging then the 100th part of lead exposure (which animal models do not bear out) or a lot of the lead exposure IQ research is confounded.
Take it up with the EPA I guess?
https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/basic-in...
It's not trying to be alarmist, it's just different from things like, say, table salt, where small amounts over time are fine but 1 pound will kill.
Lead is toxic at any dose.
This means is damages your neurons in any amount.
Contrast to say, copper, which doesn't start causing damage until levels exceed a certain tolerable threshold.
While lead is toxic at any amount, low amounts of lead cause low amounts of damage. It doesn't change the fact that the ideal exposure is 0 and over 99% of people have about 5 to 10 times the bond lead levels found in remains of our ancestors, and that even relatively low lead exposure levels from breathing lead in the air from just air pollution are linked to dramatically reduced IQ.
I have a young toddler so would have needed multiple filters throughout the house. They tend to like to drink from the bath and my anxiety can’t handle that.
What type of pipes did you have? How did you know they had lead issues?
are you not allowed to simply abandon the old pipes in place? Do you have to actually replace them?
Do you know if in Seattle newer houses are lead free?
This is serious, right? There really still are lead drinking water pipes used in the US?
Everyone here whining about lead pipes while drinking their $10 Starbucks latte from a brass boiler. lol
Isn't brass only a risk if it's heated enough to release fumes, whereas lead dust at room temperature is toxic?
When I was a child I was taught that ingesting lead caused insanity and brain damage. I was taught that the use of lead pipes was one of the main factors that caused the Roman Empire to fall. It was implied that modern man was smarter than that now and we stopped using lead in pipes.
As an adult, I learned that lead was still used in water pipes. Even the more recent "lead-free" pipes can still have a little bit of lead in them ("no more than 0.25% lead in the wetted surfaces").
The Roman Empire used lead to make wine sweeter, more colorful, better preserved and easier to drink. Apparently dissolving lead in wine enables humans to drink more of it and get drunker than would normally be possible.
Incidentally they did the same to grape syrup.
>It was implied that modern man was smarter than that now and we stopped using lead in pipes.
We learned so much from the Romans, and then burned leaded gasoline anyway!
Lead causing the downfall of two major empires in history would be very funny
That’s one of the more bizarre things in the US to me. Lead pipes have been outlawed in Bavaria in the 1800s. It’s not something anyone ever thinks about, so imagine my surprise when I moved to a major US city and was told that I should test my water.
> Lead pipes have been outlawed in Bavaria in the 1800s
Lead may not be used in EU pipes, but the fittings and solder still contain lead.
https://www.zerowater.eu/zerowater-knowledge-center/lead-in-....
This article rather seems to prove what I said?
“The authors of the study stated that it could be assumed that other municipalities in Germany – with the exception of Frankfurt am Main and the southern German states – might also be confronted with increased levels of lead in drinking water.”
It’s not surprising to me that the former GDR states that the article mentions as hotspots in the following paragraph are in a different position, they have to catch up in a lot of areas.
(And that’s not going into what’s considered “exceeded” levels in the EU.)
Infrastructure in much of the US is extremely old and crumbling, often barely holding on. In the name of profit many important upgrades and replacements are simply not done until things fail - like 46,154 bridges that are in use today that are structurally deficient. [1]
[1] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges-infras...
If we can rip and replace all lead pipes in just 10 years, we could also bury all nearby high voltage electric cables. But we won't.
Replacing lead pipes is a no-brainer (net-positive brainer really) that has essentially nothing but hugely positive results.
Burying electrical cables isn't anywhere near as clear-cut of a benefit, AFAIK. Better in some ways, worse in others, ~always more expensive.
Are we sure that microplastics from the new pipes aren't just as bad? Can you make your water reasonably microplastic-safe by running it for 2 minutes in the morning?
> Are we sure that microplastics from the new pipes aren't just as bad?
In general, yes, for all the comparisons of good vs bad that I can think of. Long term effects of microplastics vs neurotoxic metals is "we aren't quite sure long term, but not measurable brain damage" vs "guaranteed measurable brain damage short to long term".
If plastic bits are big enough, it's obviously a different equation (acute vs gradual), but that's not the implication I understood.
Usually limescale build up inside water pipes and should avoid further microplastics release into the water.
There was also a study which showed that boiling tab water with microplastics binds those in the line which builds up.
Yes, we are sure it's not as bad.
And you pipes shouldn't emit any measurable amount of microplastics. Any emission is a flaw somewhere that you are better fixing. But even with all the flaws, the microplastics are not even remotely as bad as lead.
Next on the line, yeah, eating dirt is safer than concentrated potassium cyanide, and swimming drunk in a water pool is safer than in a lava pool.
There are a few California towns that would have benefitted from buried power transmission lines in recent years.
I don't think the person you responded to is saying we shouldn't bury any lines, but rather questions the wisdom of investing enough to bury ALL lines retroactively.
> There are a few California towns that would have benefitted from buried power transmission lines in recent years.
Is it possible to bury high voltage transmission lines?
Yes
Most electrical cables are AC. Burying them just leads to higher losses.
Almost all new construction homes will be built with utilities buried: all electrical, water pipes, drains, and high speed fiber go directly to a foundation. That loss argument is valid, but in practice it isn't slowing anything down.
Why would we want to bury high voltage electric cables?
Reduced fire risk is the main reason. The $ value of damage after a big fire often isn't THAT much smaller than the cost of undergrounding cables in that area. There's also some fringe benefits for aesthetics, electrocution risk, and maintenance costs (underground maintenance is more expensive but less common)
They're much safer, have much less maintenance, and higher lifetime 'uptimes'.
Power on telephone poles have a couple problems, mainly involving trees/cars/miscreants breaking them and causing power outages (and sometimes fires). Some people also feel they're unsightly.
However, underground cables can be also be broken (e.g: by water leaks or backhoes), and in these cases, it can be more expensive and time-consuming to find and fix the break. I believe initial installation is also more costly.
I see, thank you for the explanation.
But what will it be replaced with? HDPE? If it’s plastic based, it seems that instead of lead we’ll get microplastics and other plasticizers. Neither are good. At least with lead is that if the pH is correctly maintained than I believe the risk is actually negligible. There isn’t anything you can do for plastic to prevent its leaching and degradation.
>If it’s plastic based, it seems that instead of lead we’ll get microplastics and other plasticizers.
There are many different types of plastics, and many (most?) do not use plasticizers. You are in negligible danger of exposure to them from polyethylene (HDPE/LDPE/XLPE). The main source of plasticizer exposure is flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC) (also rigid PVC isn't nearly so bad); you might also be thinking of polycarbonate, for which the monomers themselves are intrinsically rather nasty, or for polyurethane, which has similar issues but not quite so bad.
Microplastics are a problem everywhere.
But, seriously, if you're going to criticize things, and there are a few valid criticisms of plastic piping... please learn about what you're criticizing so you can make the correct criticisms and not just make unuseful knee-jerk statements.
Is there any plastic that is just carbon chains? My understanding is all plastics contain additives. This [1] is just one study of many that show HDPE (and other plastics) leaching phthalates. Please don’t come at me or anyone with the ad hominem attacks. This is something I have looked in to in the past, and is of great concern of mine.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of better.
We know for sure that lead causes retarded mental growth in kids, especially if they are under 6. The issue of microplastics is less studied and given a choice between the two I would go with plastic.
There is no minimum safe level for lead.
Wait, we still use lead pipes for drinking water?
Just one example, but in the city of Chicago, over 400K homes still get their tap water through leaded lines. The city will get an exemption to the 10 year replacement requirement due to the sheer number of pipes that need replacing meaning another 40-50 years of lead pipes based on replacing 10K/year [0].
It's pretty crazy.
- [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/01/1241470...
Sure, but isn't this the same place that mandated lead pipes for most of its existence?
My understanding is that in a lot of places, the water has essentially coated the pipes with minerals, so the water doesn’t actually touch the lead, and it ends up not being as large a problem as you’d think. I think the problems arise when municipal water changes something that lets the water dissolve away those minerals (make it acidic, for example) and start interacting directly with the lead.
This is the case in my area; our service is almost 100 years old. You just need to run the water for minute if you haven't used it recently, since the leech is very slow.
Another issue besides tearing up the whole front yard (our line is 8' deep) is it would likely destroy the ancient ceramic sewer line. An upgrade can get expensive quick
> Another issue besides tearing up the whole front yard (our line is 8' deep) is it would likely destroy the ancient ceramic sewer line. An upgrade can get expensive quick
Normally you're supposed to put away 1-2% of the home's value into a repair/maintenance fund. That way you won't get hit too hard for all the random crap that crops up when owning a house.
Yup, some infrastructure is ancient. From memory, correct me if I'm wrong, it was relatively safe in e.g. Flint because an inner lining of limescale had formed, but they changed something in the water causing that lining to deteriorate.
But redoing infrastructure is a huge and expensive undertaking, also given that 100+ years ago they weren't as diligent in mapping out things underground and they put sewage, electricity and internet in the same ground since then.
IIRC an in-between solution is lining the pipes with an inner plastic one (they have Ways), but that may not be possible everywhere and reduces the flow capacity.
Anyway there's 2.2 million miles of water piping in the US apparently, that'll take a while.
> also given that 100+ years ago they weren't as diligent in mapping out things underground and they put sewage, electricity and internet in the same ground since then.
I have some experience with the local utility companies in my city and it's shocking how often they don't know where their own lines are, even ones that are only a decade or two old. I can only imagine how lacking the knowledge is from 100+ year old infrastructure.
Our (1) infrastructure is ancient. PG&E started the Camp Fire wildfire in 2018 when a electrical transmission line built in 1921 failed (only lasted 97 years). That killed 85 people.
1: America for sure, I would suspect other countries might not be as bad, as they would have generally electrified more recently- just not that many electrical transmission lines in Romania in 1921- and are more likely to have had to rebuild after wartime.
Because I was curious: the deadliest wildfire in California's history killed 0.00021% of the state's 2018 population.
There are an unknown number of hollowed out tree logs still in service and being used to transport drinking water.
https://www.kake.com/news/wichita-used-to-use-trees-as-water...
Unavailable in EU, so here we go; https://archive.is/9I14n
Every once in a while they dig one up by accident in Boston. Many ~ancient cities don't even know where all the pipes are, or how they're connected. It'll be a colossal project.
You'd be surprised. Many places, including my neighborhood in New Jersey, don't have any access to drinking water at all. We are cooking with and drinking bottled water for the foreseeable future.
Many places have 100+ year old lead service lines.
Most GA planes still use leaded gas!
Wait till you learn that hot water sometimes has leaded pipes while the cold will be non-lead.
That's not a huge problem, though, unless you drink the hot tap water.
Which isn't the best if you have a water softener, as the hot side typically has some salt in it as well.
Water softeners don't use salt to soften the water, they use salt to clean the hardness off the negatively charged plastic beads that the water flows through. At night, when the water isn't being used, the water supply is temporarily used to flush water through the salt block and basically rinse out the beads, which is then drained.
You should only get a trace amount of sodium (milligrams per cup of water I imagine) just from any tiny bit of salty water that wasn't backwashed out during the rinse cycle, but nothing more. If your water has salty taste that means you probably need a new water softener
I thought water softners typically used an "ion exchange resin"[1] where the hard water (magnesium, calcium) ions are swapped for sodium ions[2]. So you should be able to taste some sodium.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_softening#Ion-exchange_r...
I was under the impression its simply best practice to not drink water from the shower/hot faucet. I've never tasted salt myself, just something I'd been told over the years.
Good to know, thank you.
Now can we stop using PVC for supply lines?
[flagged]
Judges wouldn't try to determine whether "ingesting lead is bad for you".
They would determine whether the EPA is acting within the powers granted to it by Congress, which is what only judges are qualified to do.
Yes and no. If congress has granted the EPA authority to regulate water to ensure it's not bad for you, then someone needs to determine what "bad for you" means.
Previously, under Chevron, the courts would defer to the EPA as the experts to make that determination (with the understanding that congress could always pass more specific legislation if they felt the EPA was overstepping its granted authority)
What the Supreme Court has said is deferring to the agency is going too far, and that if congress wants specific things regulated then it needs to be specific in it's legislation. Prima facie that makes sense, except for two major problems: congress is not productive enough in passing legislation, and congress are not the experts
This means that when questions like this arise, it comes to the courts to be the ones who end up interpreting the statutes and making the determination on what "bad for you" means.
Not anymore.
Or rather, judges have been given the power to make technical interpretations of law rather than just looking at the broad meaning of a law and leaving the technical interpretation to the agency.
See the overturning of the Chevron decision.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Lead limits are in the text of the law, as they should be. So no need to cry wolf.
Section 1417 of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) establishes the definition for “lead free” as a weighted average of 0.25% lead calculated across the wetted surfaces of a pipe, pipe fitting, plumbing fitting, and fixture and 0.2% lead for solder and flux. The Act also provides a methodology for calculating the weighted average of wetted surfaces.
I was wondering about this myself. The Loper Bright case (removing the Chevron deference) makes me wonder if the EPA can do much of anything to enforce this. I'm not that smart about laws and definitely not a lawyer, so I have no idea what I'm even questioning, really.
That's a weird way to say "Only judges are allowed to determine if an agency is acting within its congressionally (democratically) established authority or if it's autocratically making sweeping regulatory changes beyond their democratically granted authority."
The price of freedom is ~~eternal vigilance~~ childhood brain damage.
The children with permanent CNS damage can simply elect representatives in congress who are willing to act on their behalf, and then keep them in office across 3 election cycles until there is a supermajority able to enact change, and also hold the office of the president until the current SCOTUS majority retires/dies off.
That's a weird way to say you have no idea what Chevron was about and what judges do.
Judges always determined if an agency was acting within its statute.
The question that Chevron settled, was what if the statute was too ambiguous? Congress used to update laws regularly, but those times are over. It can't legislate effectively anymore. A lot of our laws are ancient and they're designed for a bygone era that often predates even the computer, never mind the internet, modern medicine, etc.
Chevron said, judges don't get to make decisions in those cases. Because those would be arbitrary decisions. It's better to have third party experts make those decisions until Congress can catch up. And if Congress has a problem it can overrule them as it always could. Agencies set up processes to make the review open, to gather data and evidence, comments for the public, etc.
Now we have the worst of all worlds. Appointed partisan judges, with no oversight, no accountability, get to make monumental arbitrary decisions about how minutia of our lives work, based on absolutely nothing, with no review, no criteria and no relevant expertise at all. All while essentially having no code of ethics and being subject to lobbying.
> Congress used to update laws regularly, but those times are over. It can't legislate effectively anymore.
This is defeatist, and misses the point. Congress should continue to update laws regularly and the SC decision provides an impetus for them to start doing so. Congress mandating the regulation also has the effect of Congress determining the scope of legislation. With Chevron, there's no reason for them to update laws because they just let, e.g., the EPA make up the scope of the laws themselves. (Why people will claim "overreach".)
The scenario this enabled is a new presidential administration would be elected who would fire the old regulatory leadership and hire their own, effectively allowing the executive branch to re-write the law every 4-8 years. There was a lot of opinion thrown around about how the SC decision is a power grab for the judicial branch and I just don't see it. They took power away from the executive and gave it back to the legislative, where it had been before Congress became useless.
Whether or not one agrees with this approach is worth considering, but man, talk about comments that demonstrate the author has "no idea what Chevron was about".
It is a typical example of "I'm right so I should be allowed to bypass the democratic process and do whatever I want" thinking. It's quite dangerous.
Good luck in NYC lol.
If you could even attempt it, it would take 100 years.
I’d really love if it someone crunched the numbers and estimated how much NIMBYism contributes to lead poisoning by not allowing older homes to be replaced with newer, modern homes.
A lot of NIMBYism is less about preventing old homes from being replaced, and more about setting limits that prevent density such as low height limits, high setbacks, and high parking requirements. This results in a lot of projects not penciling out financially, and less housing gets build as a result.
Yes, when older homes get replaced by newer, high-density housing, the lead pipes go bye-bye. That was the entire point. NIMBYs are often fine replacing existing homes with newer homes of the exact same size.
can we also wire fiber to every home and apartment in the country and screw all these ISP monopolies?
Whoever figures out broadband over utility lines is going to clean up.
Probably lower priority with radio getting ever better.
This makes me think of the Roman Empire.
Every incoming kindergartner, middle school student and high school student should be required to submit a blood lead level test to their school for data collection. This can be easily administered as part of their yearly checkup.
That data can then be used for tracking, remediation and support.
It would also reveal how much differential education outcomes are correlated to lead levels.
If you've had a baby in recent years, you'd know that pediatricians in the US often already do test for lead levels.