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Lead has traditionally been one of the most useful of elements. Unfortunately, despite its inherent usefulness, lead is a toxic substance and its use has been much circumscribed over the years and for very good reason. Lead paint is no longer available, but its legacy remains in the millions of homes painted with it. Rates of lead poisoning and elevated blood-lead levels in children are briskly winding down to zero, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making a final push to eliminate the hazards of lead dust. As part of that effort, the agency has set its sights on the renovation and remodeling (R&R) industry. Even though the details of their own studies show little in the way of a link between R&R work and elevated blood-lead, the EPA is persisting with its planned certification of R&R workers. The EPA's motives for pushing new regulations onto the US' R&R workers are undoubtedly pure. But this policy is likely to do much more harm than good.

STATUS: EPA comment period closed May 25.

Lead has traditionally been one of the most useful of elements. Over the years it has adorned Americans' roofs, windows, plumbing, and "silverware." In the eighteenth century, our threadbare colonial ancestors fired it from their Pennsylvania rifles, while their high-living descendants burned it in their cars and trucks until the mid 1990s.

Unfortunately, despite its inherent usefulness, lead is a toxic substance and its use has been much circumscribed over the years and for very good reason. Between regulatory action and the recent availability of superior and more economical alternatives (mainly plastics coupled with improved supplies of nontoxic substitute metals), Americans' contact with lead has shrunk to almost nothing with one glaring exception: lingering deposits of lead-based paint.

Although lead had long been used as a pigment, modern paint manufacturers discovered that adding lead to paint hastened drying, kept out moisture, improved durability, and gave walls a fresh, clean appearance. However, as concerns about the toxicity of lead grew, manufacturers began reducing the amount of lead in paint starting in the 1940s. In 1955, the paint industry voluntarily limited lead use in paint to one percent of weight, which tied the industry over until the first lead substitutes became widely available in the early 1960s. Lead-free paints very quickly took over the market, and lead-based paint had all but disappeared from shelves by the time the government finally banned lead paint in 1978-over 30 years after private industry first started looking at ways to reduce the amount of lead in paint.

Lead paint is no longer available, but its legacy remains in the millions of homes painted with it. Although nowhere near the "epidemic" levels often claimed by some activists, the fact remains that every year thousands of children do suffer elevated blood-lead levels either as a result of direct ingestion of leaded paint chips or prolonged exposure to lead dust slowly atomizing oft ancient, deteriorating paint.

Rates of lead poisoning and elevated blood-lead levels in children are briskly winding down to zero, but the Environmental Protection Agency is making a final push to eliminate the hazards of lead dust. As part of that effort, the agency has set its sights on the renovation and remodeling (R&R) industry.

According to recently proposed EPA regulations, R&R work in older homes disturbs lead paint, which generates lead-contaminated dust, elevating blood-lead levels in young children and lowering IQ scores. For that reason, the EPA wants to require that all R&R firms doing such work "for compensation" must complete an EPA-approved certification program, use special (and very expensive) equipment, and employ time-consuming lead-safe work practices. This all appears to make sense and, admittedly, sounds like a very good idea, until we explore some of the details and discover that the sense may be common but not any good.

For starters, the EPA claims that a scientific study it conducted using the Wisconsin Bureau of Public Health's childhood blood-lead registry proved that having some form of R&R work done in one's home increased the likelihood of a child living there suffering an elevated blood-lead level by 30 percent. However, the study was far from scientific. Rather than doing the logical thing, which would have been to measure the blood-lead levels of children before and after R&R work, researchers simply selected 3,654 children whose blood-lead levels were already known, called their parents, and asked them survey questions about any R&R work in their homes over the previous year. Based on the raw, uncontrolled, single-variable of having "any R&R work" done, the EPA concluded the 30 percent increase in elevated blood-lead levels with statistical significance. While this figure appears in the study, it should not have made its way into the conclusion. The appropriate variable to use would have been this figure after it had been adjusted for the presence of various confounding variables, such as income, race, home age, or the presence of peeling paint. These confounding variables made up the study's "baseline," and are known to also influence the probability of elevated blood-lead levels. Simply put, researchers had to figure out whether the renovations themselves were causing elevated blood-lead, or whether other factors known to elevate bloodlead might just happen to be more prevalent in homes experiencing renovations. For example, poor people live in old homes with deteriorating paint, and deteriorating paint requires renovation. If a child in the home experiences an elevated blood-lead level, is it because of the renovation? Or has the elevated blood-lead level resulted from the years of deteriorating paint that prompted the renovation?

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Unfortunately for the EPA, its contention that R&R work increases the chances of elevated blood-lead evaporated once the appropriate baseline controls were added. Yet the agency chose to ignore the proper finding and instead drew its conclusion from the questionable, uncontrolled initial data. What is even more interesting about the Wisconsin study is that it came on the heels of two previous EPA studies that examined the relationship between lead-contaminated dust and elevated blood-lead levels in R&R workers. Known as Phase I and Phase II of a much larger EPA R&R project (the Wisconsin study is considered Phase III), these two studies found that R&R workers working in buildings built before 1950 kicked up plenty of dust and took few precautions but, surprisingly, this did not translate into elevated blood-lead levels.

Another interesting aspect of the Wisconsin study is its "finding" that the link between renovations and elevated lead levels in blood proved just as persistent in homes built after 1980 as in those built before. This is indeed strange, as homes built after 1980 are unlikely to contain any lead paint. The EPA explained that this discrepancy might be a result of either old stocks of lead paint being used in newer housing, or that respondents simply miscalculating the age of their homes. However, both explanations are unlikely. The manufacture of lead paint may have been banned in 1978, but it had essentially disappeared from the market years before. Of course, it is possible that residents may not know the age of their homes, but this seems a rather dubious explanation of the anomaly. For one thing, Wisconsin residents are reminded of the age of their homes every time their property valuation changes, and according to those who handle property taxes in Wisconsin, people generally do know how old their homes are.

Even though the details of their own studies show little in the way of a link between R&R work and elevated blood-lead, the EPA is persisting with its planned certification of R&R workers. These proposed rules may not produce lower blood-lead levels, but they will raise the cost of renovation and remodeling. Conventional wisdom is that the extra time, training, specialty equipment, and insurance (new regulations means new potential legal liabilities) will increase the price of R&R work by between 20 to 30 percent. There is little reason to impose these costs on society. Most R&R work is conducted by very small firms or even lone handymen, who do not bear regulatory costs well. Furthermore, those paying for R&R are overwhelmingly older baby boomers, whose children have long since grown up and left home. Those with young children or couples looking to start families typically conduct renovations themselves and usually only call in professionals for highly specialized tasks, such as electrical work, which generate little in the way of dust. Not only do families with young children already carry out most R&R work themselves, but increasing the cost of professional services is likely to cause them to substitute even more of their own work. Moreover, as flaking or deteriorating paint is definitely proven to elevate blood-lead while R&R work is not, then children arguably face a greater threat from renovations deferred because of higher costs.

The EPA's motives for pushing new regulations onto the nation's R&R workers are undoubtedly pure. But this policy is likely to do much more harm than good. The proposed rules are chasing a problem that docs not exist and will hurt both workers and consumers, while doing little for America's children. There is a time and a place for regulations, but they should be employed when they are needed, where they are effective, and only if their costs are low and their benefits high. Despite good intentions, the EPA's proposed rules for renovation and remodeling work meet none of these criteria.

-Alastair Walling