Tamara, what exactly are you trying to do here?

From Leonard Rubin, Tamara’s (Lead Safe Mama’s) Husband.

Dear Commentor(s),

It’s quite frustrating that the following point evidently needs to be reiterated so frequently (at least every month or so for the last several years running!), but this seems to be unavoidable:

To those of you who challenge/question/discount/disbelieve the value of Tamara’s diligent work testing consumer goods and posting XRF total lead/mercury/cadmium/arsenic content results [regardless of whether your narrow frame of reference that compels you to do so has been formed through honest ignorance, confusion, misplaced trust, naivety, arrogant overconfidence, jaded cynicism or professional indoctrination], let me again explain her mission:

To merely detect, quantify and publish the presence of extremely neurotoxic heavy metals in consumer goods —especially items that are commonly in daily use in our homes — for the sole purpose of tracking these elements [as distinct from any explicit risk assessment (or even any risk assertion in most cases), also as distinct from anything in the realm of fear mongering, alarmism, shaming, boycott promotion or other specific narrow political goals, spreading fake science, etc., etc.!]

Yeah, please read that ^^^ again.

So if Tamara’s aim is distinct from any/all of the above (all false motives, incidentally, of which she is perpetually accused!), then WHAT THE HELL IS SHE REALLY UP TO?

Listen up:

Tamara Rubin is of the belief that the ever-increasing volume of industrial mining, transport, refining, manufacturing, and post-consumer handling/disposal/re-purposing (“up-cycling”)/etc. of consumer products containing highly neurotoxic heavy metals is an environmentally UNsustainable activity that has poisoned our planet and our species and should be curtailed.

Much as the ostensible point of nuclear arms treaties and opposition to nuclear fission reactors is the reduction of enriched plutonium production worldwide to reduce and eliminate the grave threat that it poses to our environment and continuation of our species, we need to come to grips with the impact of the widespread commercial use of neurotoxic heavy metals – whenever and wherever reasonable substitute materials are available or alternate manufacturing processes are achievable.

The horrific consequences of failing to reduce the mining, refining and manufacturing of the materials for profit and or mere “commercial convenience” — which include the inevitable continued poisoning of our habitat and our children — are simply not acceptable.

So please consider this wider context when asserting that “if it passes a leach test [at the time of manufacture] there is no risk” or similar inanities.

Len Rubin
Father, husband, environmentalist, human
February 24th, 2018

(Photo of Len today with our three youngest boys; AJ (15), Avi (13) and Charlie (9))