After tests showed millions of Americans' drinking water was contaminated with lead, infrastructure quickly became a hot topic as average Americans looked for new ways to prevent lead contamination. Unfortunately, your drinking water may not be the only problem. You can voluntarily contaminate your food with lead and cadmium without even realizing it. Here's how you do it.
Although glassware is generally considered safe, your drinking glasses may be contaminated with lead and cadmium metal. These two heavy metals are often added to low-quality glass products to help them melt during the manufacturing process, but they can have negative effects on your health. Therefore, you need to know how to identify products contaminated with lead or cadmium.
In this guide, we explain why glassware sometimes contains lead and cadmium, how these two metals can affect your health, and how to quickly identify bad drinking glasses. Use this information to purchase safe products and protect your family at home.
What is lead?
Despite its bad reputation, lead is nothing more than a naturally occurring metal found on the Earth's surface. But unlike iron, aluminum or gold, even small amounts of lead can enter our bodies and cause permanent damage to our internal systems. What's even worse is that it's so easy to find small amounts of lead in our daily lives.
Lead is found in the soil around us, in the water we use to wash our clothes and even in the air we breathe – usually as a result of fossil fuels and other chemical processes. For decades, common household products like gasoline, paint, and even our dishes were filled with lead to help stabilize the compounds. Unfortunately, all that lead seeped into Americans' nervous systems.
Today, OSHA and the EPA have worked hard to reduce the amount of lead in our everyday consumer goods, but you still need to be careful to avoid it in both imported and antique products.
Is stained glass safe?
You probably won't show any signs of acutelead poisoningunless you have been exposed to high levels of lead for a short time. If you do have this, you may suddenly experience:
➔Fatigue and physical weakness
➔Headache
➔Tingling
➔Abdominal pain and constipation
➔Lost appetite
➔Irritability and moodiness
➔Short-term memory loss
Unfortunately, however, most victims do not show signs of lead poisoning until months or even years of exposure have passed. This is what makes lead poisoning so insidious. You can slowly poison yourself over many months without even realizing it, and by the time you realize it, the damage may be permanent.
Long-term exposure to lead can cause nerve damage, permanent memory loss, intellectual disability in children, and even miscarriage and death. That's why it's crucial that you inspect your glass for lead before it harms your health.
Wat is cadmium
Like lead, cadmium is another naturally occurring metal found on the Earth's surface. It has a soft, whitish-blue hue and is often found in zinc ore. Today it is commonly used in jewelry and accessories, rechargeable batteries and other industrial products, and is sometimes used as a coating for electronics, solar panels, plastics and dyes and pigments.
Although less known than lead, cadmium is also a highly toxic heavy metal. Unfortunately, it is much more commonly used in everyday products – from electronics to cookware and kitchen utensils.
Is cadmium glass safe?
Like lead, it takes a while to build up in the body.cadmiumvergiftigingdoesn't happen overnight. But if enough toxins build up, you can experience equally severe symptoms that last for years or even a lifetime. These symptoms include:
➔Kidney disease
➔Loss of bone mass
➔Nerve damage
➔Cardiovascular weakness
➔Cancer
Your body can process cadmium and remove it through the urinary tract, but it takes time to completely remove the heavy metal. During that time, cadmium continues to wreak havoc as it circulates through your blood, liver, and kidneys.
Lead and cadmium used in drinking glasses
Although lead and cadmium have been used in industrial processes for decades, it was not clear how common these two metals were in common kitchenware, especially drinking glasses. But in a 2017 study at the University of Plymouth, researchers found that about 70% of all drinking cups contained traces of lead and cadmium.
While not all of these drinking glasses contained dangerous levels of lead and cadmium, the large amount of glass that contained heavy metals is notable. In addition, some of the glassware tested was found to contain hundreds and even thousands of times more lead than what the EPA considers safe for human consumption.
Under current regulations from the U.S. Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment, any lead concentration above 200 ppm is too high for human consumption. This means that some drinking cups contain as much as 400,000 parts of lead for every 1,000,000 parts. At this concentration, you and your family are certainly at risk for lead poisoning.
So if the average person knows that lead and cadmium are toxic in large quantities, why do manufacturers continue to produce drinking cups with such high concentrations of heavy metals? It comes down to reducing costs and improving the overall look of their products.
When manufacturers mix lead with glass, it oxidizes and helps the glass to melt at a lower temperature. The glass is then easier to manipulate and bend into an aesthetic shape without the need to heat it for long periods. In addition, many decorative drinking glasses are coated with a lead- or cadmium-based enamel that, if scratched, flakes off and leaves lead and cadmium in your drink.
Lead and cadmium free drinking glass
If you are concerned about your family's health, rest assured that not all drinking glasses contain lead. Although the 2017 University of Plymouth study shows the prevalence of lead and cadmium in drinking cups, you can prevent contamination of your drinks by purchasing higher quality lead-free glass.
There are plenty of lead- and cadmium-free drinking cups on the market, if you know how to look for them. However, before you go shopping, take a moment to inspect your own glasses. If they are already lead and cadmium free, there is no point in replacing them. Follow our guidelines in the next section to find out if your glasses are lead-free.
Buj our high-quality, lead- and cadmium-free glassware made in Europe. Take care of your family.
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How do you know if a drinking glass contains lead?
First things first, if you don't drink from crystal, antique, or decorative glass, your glass is most likely lead-free. However, it doesn't hurt to check. Start by picking up a glass and feeling the weight in your hand. Lead glass is generally much heavier than lead-free glass due to the higher metal content in the crystals.
Once you feel the weight of the glass in your hand, tap the side of the glass with your fingernail or the tang of a fork. If it makes a soft clink, your glass is probably safe. But if it forms a long ring, it may contain heavy metals. The longer the ring lasts, the more lead or cadmium your drink contains.
Another way to tell if your drink is lead-free is to hold it up to the light. Standard glassware is better at refracting light, meaning you should be able to see a prism of light refracting into a rainbow. If you're having trouble making a rainbow, no matter how you hold the glass, it may contain lead.
If you're still unsure, you can test your glassware by leaving a cup of distilled white vinegar in one of your drinking glasses overnight. Because vinegar is naturally acidic, the lead quickly dissolves in the vinegar and you can test it for signs of contamination after 12 hours. Lead test kits are inexpensive and easy to find at most hardware stores.
Is it safe to drink from antique glassware?
No matter how beautiful your heirloom glass may be, your great-grandmother's glassware may be contaminated with high concentrations of cadmium and lead. Products produced before the 1970s were not subject to the same stringent testing and regulations as they are today, so lead and cadmium were both likely added during the manufacturing process.
If you are attached to your antique drinking glasses, we recommend testing them for lead before using them. If they test positive, keep them for decoration only. Consuming them as a drink could endanger the health of you and your family.
Are drinking glasses from China safe?
Chinese products are often the subject of great skepticism – and rightly so. Over the years, China has developed a reputation for producing low-quality products, and especially in kitchenware, the country has been widely criticized for the safety of the products it exports to the United States. After years and years of bad consumer experiences, there has been a general shift from Chinese-made products to more focus on European-made products due to their well-known and trusted production process. But knowing where the glass comes from is of course not enough, so how do we know which glasses are really safe?
In addition to checking each glass for lead and cadmium, you can follow some standard rules to avoid low-quality products:
➔Buy glassware only from a reputable store.
➔Check the company's testing documents online and look for lead-free and cadmium-free labels on the packaging
➔Look for other labels that warn you not to consume food or drink from glassware, such as;
➔Decorative
➔Not for food use
➔Poisonous
➔Lead-based glaze
➔Glaze contains lead
➔Food consumption can cause contamination
If you live in California, you can also look for a mandatory lead alert. BelowCalifornia's Proposition 65manufacturers must label products if they contain lead above FDA-approved levels. This warning reads as follows:
"WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals, including lead, known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm."
Is it possible to find lead and cadmium free crystal?
For almost all of history, crystal glass has been made with a mixture of lead and cadmium. By adding these two heavy metals during the production phase, crystal makers were able to create strong and beautiful glass with intricate designs. But now that the general public has learned how dangerous lead and cadmium can be, many are wondering if they can still use crystal glass safely.
Fortunately, modern manufacturers have come up with a unique way to produce high-quality crystal glass without contaminating it with toxic heavy metals. Instead, they add a mixture of potassium oxide, barium oxide and zinc oxide. Although this process still requires added metals, potassium, barium and zinc are all safe for human use.
However, the next time you buy expensive crystal drinkware, always make sure you check the manufacturer's website. Don't let your refined taste ruin your health.
What is the safest glass to drink from?
While it is difficult to know exactly what goes into the manufacturing process, the safest drinking glasses are those produced by well-known, respected and reputable glass companies. Every glassware company worth its name has put its products through rigorous testing for lead and cadmium to ensure the safety of its customers.
click hereto purchase our high-quality, lead- and cadmium-free European-made glassware. Take care of your family.
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While no company openly advertises that their products contain dangerous levels of heavy metals, recent research has shown that most beverage containers contain traces of lead and cadmium. Protect the health of you and your family by inspecting your drinking cups and investing in guaranteed lead/cadmium-free products. It's not worth saving a few dollars on glassware and risking your health. Taking risks with your health can have lifelong consequences.
