Our List of Lab-Tested Safer Choices Now Includes 96 products!

September 3, 2025
(Shared yesterday on social media)

September 2, 2025

Hi all!

I hope you are having a good Tuesday!

I am continuing the search for an apartment (or room for rent) for my 20-year-old son attending UH Manoa. If anyone has any leads there for me, I would greatly appreciate it. It would seem that we are looking for a true unicorn: A mold-free, cockroach-free, affordable place… with working air conditioning that is walking distance to campus! In Oahu, this is nearly impossible (and the dorms here literally meet none of those criteria except being “walking distance!”).

And now… back to the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC:

Our Lab-Tested Safer Choices List (a compilation of clean products that we have identified through the Lead Safe Mama, LLC Community Collaborative Laboratory Testing Initiative) has now been updated to include all of the newly discovered safer choices from August’s lab testing batch, and the list now includes a total of 96 products! We’re almost to 100! Woot!

Thank you to everyone for making this possible!

This list is important not because of the 96 specific cleaner products we have identified…

But because it demonstrates (across many product types with varied ingredient profiles, for products manufactured by many different industries) that the standards we (all of us in the Lead Safe Mama community) advocate for are achievable (action levels of 5 ppb for Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury, as well as an action level of 10 ppb Arsenic).

Manufacturers can (and do) create safer products for human consumption and use.

We (as consumers) need to use the information we have collected so far to rally together and convince our elected representatives to require (through well-crafted, clearly-worded, legislative initiatives that are actually enforceable laws, not just the un-enforceable “guidance” the FDA has currently published) that ALL products we consume or use in (or on) our bodies meet these standards. The standards we are advocating for are safer for all humans — of all genders and ages (not just children under a certain age and pregnant women).

Lead poisoning does not discriminate. Lead is an equal opportunity poison.

All relevant federal agencies have published public statements in agreement with the consensus of the scientific and medical community that there is no safe level of Lead exposure for human beings.

We need to stop letting industry representatives get away with making excuses for the Lead contamination of their products. The narrative that “everything is contaminated” is simply false. Together, we have proved this.

If everything we consume (or use on our bodies) had test results of “less than 5 ppb” (for all four primary heavy metals — Lead, Cadmium, Mercury, and Arsenic), the popular industry-influenced argumentation behind “allowable”/ permissible levels of toxicants (heavy metals) focused on serving size-based metrics would disappear, as that argumentation would become irrelevant. We (societally) would no longer need to be concerned with how much of a certain Lead-contaminated product we ate or used (and whether consuming or using that product could put us over any daily “allowable limits,” per whichever outdated serving size-based metrics manufacturers and government agencies now reference as guidelines).

And with that probably less-than-perfectly articulated stance* (but you get the idea!), here’s the link to our updated safer choices list with 96 lab-tested safer options. Thank you for checking it out (please do read the narrative included above and below the list, as it answers most related questions you may have): https://tamararubin.com/safer-choices/

If you want to help us continue finding safer choices (by contributing to help us cover the costs of testing and reporting on more products), here’s our list of open (not-yet-funded) campaigns to help with the cost of laboratory testing and reporting. Here also is our general GoFundMe campaign (as funds raised through this campaign will also support this initiative).

Thank you.

Tamara Rubin
& The Lead Safe Mama Team

*Writing with kids underfoot, so just a wee bit distracted!