Human Environment Production, Uses, Trends

Lead in the Human Environment Production, Uses, Trends 

This chapter presents the information for a key question relevant to this book How much lead has entered the environment of human populations Data for such topics as the rates of lead entry over time, the critical timelines for major increases in lead s dispersal into the human environment, the past and present uses of the element, and discernible trends in the production, consumption, and dispersal of lead are included. 

Lead production—mining, milling, smelting, refining—in the United States has historically occurred in areas relatively remote from points of lead consumption (NAS/NRC, 1993 U.S. EPA, 1986, 2006 Nriagu and Pacyna, 1988 McCord, 1953 Murray, 1926). This particularly applies to consumption of lead in urbanized, heavily populated areas for diverse purposes such as lead for paint pigments, lead used in the production of 

Trace Metals and other Contaminants in the EnTiromnent, Volume 10 

It has been said that, in the fullness of time, all lead used by human populations eventually becomes lead dispersed and lead contamination in the form of future background with the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations (NAS/NRC, 1993, p. 18). There are nmnerous examples of this inexorable movement of lead from use to waste stream, a movement aided by complex entries and exits from numerous and diverse environmental compartments. Examples include lead that becomes the material of discrete artifacts as well as lead that is dispersed uniformly with its production into environmental compartments as constituents of the atmosphere, leaded dusts from atmospheric fallout, lead in riverine and marine sediments, lead in biota, etc. The close relationship of lead production to eventual lead dispersal and environmental contamination over both the near and long term means that one cannot get a handle on the latter without some quantitative assessment of the former. 

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