West Elm White Ceramic Large Dinner Plate (Indonesia): Lead-safe food surface & high-Lead back mark/logo area.

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Introduction:

Tamara Rubin is an independent advocate for consumer goods safety, and she is also a mother of Lead-poisoned children. She began testing consumer goods for toxicants in 2009, and was the parent-advocate responsible for finding Lead in the popular fidget spinner toys in 2017. She uses XRF testing (a scientific method used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission) to test consumer goods for metallic toxicants (including Lead, Cadmium, Mercury and Arsenic). To read more about the testing methodology employed for the test results reported on this blog, please click this link.


Full XRF test results for the West Elm dish pictured
(made in Indonesia)

120-second reading, Food Surface of Dish – reading #1

  • Lead (Pb): 5 +/- 2 ppm
  • Cadmium (Cd): 4 +/-1 ppm
  • Mercury (Hg): non-detect
  • Bromine (Br): non-detect
  • Chromium (Cr): non-detect
  • Iron (Fe): 454 +/- 30 ppm
  • Zinc (Zn): 8 +/- 3 ppm
  • Indium (In): 3 +/- 2 ppm
  • Tin (Sn): 8 +/- 2 ppm
  • Bismuth (Bi): 29 +/- 2 ppm

120-second reading, Food Surface of Dish – reading #2

  • Lead (Pb): 4 +/- 2 ppm
  • Cadmium (Cd): 3 +/-1 ppm
  • Mercury (Hg): non-detect
  • Bromine (Br): non-detect
  • Chromium (Cr): non-detect
  • Iron (Fe): 543 +/- 30 ppm
  • Zinc (Zn): 7 +/- 3 ppm
  • Tin (Sn): 6 +/- 2 ppm
  • Bismuth (Bi): 20 +/- 2 ppm

30-second reading, Back Mark / Logo of Dish – reading #1
over hot cup 
symbol 

  • Lead (Pb): 3,441 +/- 51 ppm
  • Cadmium (Cd): 41 +/-3 ppm
  • Mercury (Hg): non-detect
  • Bromine (Br): non-detect
  • Chromium (Cr): 1,076 +/- 156
  • Manganese (Mn): 1,996 +/- 125 ppm
  • Cobalt (Co): 1,754 +/- 66 ppm
  • Zinc (Zn): 808 +/- 26 ppm
  • Tin (Sn): 7 +/- 4 ppm
  • Platinum (Pt): 103 +/- 24 ppm

60-second reading, Back Mark / Logo of Dish – reading #2
over microwave 
symbol 

  • Lead (Pb): 3,281 +/- 36 ppm
  • Cadmium (Cd): 38 +/- 2 ppm
  • Mercury (Hg): non-detect
  • Bromine (Br): non-detect
  • Chromium (Cr): 973 +/- 112
  • Manganese (Mn): 1,854 +/- 89 ppm
  • Iron (Fe): 1,990 +/- 64 ppm
  • Cobalt (Co): 1,535 +/- 45 ppm
  • Zinc (Zn): 806 +/- 19 ppm
  • Tin (Sn): 7 +/- 3 ppm
  • Platinum (Pt): 82 +/- 17 ppm

Some additional reading that might be of interest:

Thanks for reading. Thank you for sharing my posts. As always, please let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them personally as soon as I have a moment (which may not be right away – but I will try!)

Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama

Amazon links are affiliate links. If you purchase something after clicking on one of my links I may receive a percentage of what you spend – at no extra cost to you.

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5 Comments

  1. Hi Tamara,
    So nearly a good plate, then they put lead paint in the print. I guess there is not a lot of lead there. 3341 ppm would be 3.3 mcg if there was 1mg of paint. However, I wonder, if the sample is small, could the XRF scanner be also reading the substrate, which is glaze or ceramic, and so diluting the result such that the actual paint could have a lot higher concentration of lead?

  2. Do you test this only sent by your viewers or you yourself pick randomly? I request you to test some indian stuff as well…if possible. Do you charge fee for that as well?

  3. Hi Tamara, I have these dishes and am trying to decipher whether or not they are safe. Does it matter that there is lead on the back if we aren’t eating off that surface? Thanks for all you do!!! This info is so helpful!

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