Lead exposure can do bad things to a human body. Cumulative exposure to high levels of lead over time can cause neurological damage, liver disease, cardiovascular complications and other unpleasant side effects. 
   Recently a move has been afoot in legislatures everywhere—most notably in California and Vermont--to try and reduce everyone’s exposure to lead, and one way was to change the plumbing fixtures we all use. So it was, then, that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California Assembly Bill 1953 in September 2006. AB 1953, which is set to carry the full weight of law in the Golden State on Jan. 1, 2010, specifies basically that the lead content of products must be a weighted average of not more than 0.25 percent in pipes, fixtures, and fittings. After Jan. 1, 2010, water fixtures and fittings that wear out will have to be replaced with so-called "lead-free" items containing no more than 0.25 percent lead as described above.

   This would appear to present a challenge to manufacturers, a group that faced a tough non-choice: either completely forget about selling products in California (and Vermont) or take advantage of the time provided by the debate surrounding the bill as it passed through the legislature and get compliant products into the pipeline ASAP.

   Of course, California’s market for plumbing products is too large to ignore, and most all of the manufacturers got cracking, according to Barbara Higgens, for the past 11 years the executive director of the Plumbing Manufacturers Institute in Rolling Meadows, Ill.

   PMI’s member companies produce just about every plumbing product consumed in the U.S. and, Higgens said, they’re all taking the new lead requirements very seriously.

   “PMI is actually taking the template of the California legislation and trying to encourage compliance on a national level so that the states are harmonized,” Higgens said. “Vermont was ready to go to a different percentage of lead but PMI sent a letter and we were able to get Vermont to harmonize with California. The worst thing in the world would be to have 50 different standards for lead content.”

   Higgens said manufacturers, PMI member companies, at least, are “well positioned” to be able to hit the ground running in California and Vermont in 2010 and in any other state that adopts the same lead standards.

   “It has been a struggle to come up with alternative materials and so forth--it has not been an easy thing to do--but, because they had such early warning, I think they are in really good shape,” Higgens said, adding other states are, in fact, eyeing lead content laws for plumbing products.

   “Massachusetts is looking at in alternative chemicals bill, and that includes a whole laundry list of things including lead,” she said. We're watching that closely. There are other places that are beginning to kick around the idea. If there's any way to harmonize all the states, that's what we want to do. And that'll make it easier on the states, too. If they have a model to look at they don't have to go through the difficulty of coming up with their own standards.”

   Look for the rest of this story in the July issue of Reeves Journal, coming soon to a mailbox near you!