Boston Home Improvement Blog

New EPA standards for lead paint removal; grants and loans for Boston and Massachusetts

What's in your window sill?

New lead paint rules have been issued by the Environmental Protection Agency concerning proper procedures for removing lead paint in the U.S.

Gulliford said the EPA's new standards for renovations are estimated to protect 1.4 million children, once the requirements are in full effect with an average additional cost of $35 per renovation project.

He said the rule won't go into effect until 2010 to give contractors time to comply.

Contractors will have to be certified. "A renovator failing to comply could potentially have their certification revoked or face a standard Toxic Substances Control Act penalty of $25,000 a day," said EPA spokesman Timothy Lyons.

Lead as an additive in the house has a history stretching back to the Roman Empire. Used in cups, coins, pitchers, metal weapons, and even cosmetic face powders, lead's presence in plumbing (the word "plumbing" comes from the word "plumbum," the Roman word for lead) has been blamed by some historians on the Empire's downfall. Symptoms of lead poisoning can include cognitive delays, hyperactivity, neurological impairment, and poor coordination, among others.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s in Europe and North America, lead was used in teething powders, indoor plumbing, and common surface coatings such as paints and varnishes. Before 1920, however, many European countries began to ban lead in indoor paints. In the United States, anti-lead crusades began in the 1930s, though lead in indoor paints was not officially banned until 1978.

While the number of children with high lead levels and lead poisoning has dropped significantly since 1978, hundreds of thousands of children still have lead levels that exceed established safety levels.

My older son has high lead levels and is part of the "hundreds of thousands." We read these statistics and the numbers go in and out of our heads until the moment a doctor pulls out a lab sheet and your child is now part of the statistic.

In many cases of high lead levels in children, no obvious culprit can be found; lead is common in older homes, and there are recorded cases of children being exposed to high lead levels simply from taking baths in tubs with lead in the ceramic. Note: yet another surface to test with a lead testing kit if your bathtub is from the 1970s or earlier.

Simple lead test kits can be found at any hardware store for testing various surfaces; deleading a house is a serious undertaking and requires a well-trained specialist. Read one parent's account of her family home's deleading here.

The new EPA procedures will require all lead removal experts to undergo retraining to learn the updated methods.

The City of Boston and the state of Massachusetts both have grant and 0% interest loan programs to help with deleading; learn more at Grants and Loans for Deleading.

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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