While at school the other day, a colleague of mine noticed the vinyl Spiderman lunch box I was carrying. And yes, that is my lunch box; Will’s has a Yu Gi Oh! theme to it. Anyway, this colleague of mine said “You know, a lot of these soft-sided lunch boxes contain lead.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, they passed around a notice at the EMU Children’s Institute,” where said colleague’s children attend pre-school.
To get to the point: according to studies done by the Center for Environmental Health, there are some soft-sided lunchboxes out there that contain way too much lead. Furthermore, according to Snopes.com, this is not a hoax.
Now, as even the Center for Environmental Health web site makes clear, it’s not like the lead-containing lunch boxes are as dangerous to kids as eating or inhaling paint particles or something. Still, Will and I like to stay on a low-lead diet, so we swung by Home Depot and bought one of the lead testing kits suggested by the CEH web site. Happily, we are carrying around lunch boxes free of lead and made of pure vinyl/petrochemical plastic-like products.