federal recall notices going back to 1973. reactive, these are products already pulled from the US market for danger. mostly toys, paint, cookware, and jewelry. most rows do not carry ppb numbers, just the product and the reason. 492 records.
the US consumer product safety commission has authority over most things sold in the US that aren't food, drugs, cosmetics, cars, or guns. when something gets pulled for lead, usually toys, paint, cookware, or kids' jewelry, CPSC publishes the recall.
that is the key thing to understand about this dataset: CPSC is reactive. these are not proactive surveys. somebody, a parent, a state lab, a competitor, an importer, already found the problem. CPSC writes it up, the company pulls the product, the recall goes in the database. the EU monitors products more intensively than the FDA and CPSC who only publish recall notices, so european data tells you what is on shelves while CPSC data only tells you what came off shelves.
this slice contributes 492 records going back to 1973. most CPSC rows do not carry a ppb measurement, the recall report says "high lead" or "exceeds CPSC limit" without giving the number. those show as "recall record" in the table.
that said, when CPSC pulls something it usually has a real reason, and the historical depth (50+ years) is unique. nobody else in this database covers the 1970s and 1980s.
CPSC contributed measurements to 10 of the 13 categories in the lead database. each card links to the full sortable table for that category, where you can filter by source = "CPSC" to see only these rows.
metals tested: lead.
units: normalized to ppb (parts per billion by mass), identical to µg/kg. 1,000 ppb = 1 ppm = 1 mg/kg = 0.0001%. recall records (where the original notice did not publish a concentration) are flagged in the table as "recall record" rather than a number.
license: public domain (federal). when you reuse rows from this source, attribute the original source. the unified database itself is published under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
official source: https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls
the lead database hub stitches together CPSC with eight other open-license sources for a unified, searchable view of consumer-product heavy-metal data. nine sources, thirteen categories, 67,497 measurements, all normalized to the same units.
six tools my family uses to keep our kid under the fda action threshold. type your email. you get all six on this page in two seconds.
i copied your email to the list. the first email lands in a couple minutes. open the pack below now.
bookmark this page. the database and the leaducational pages update almost every day. the bottle sheet and the dish list grow as the lab finishes new runs.
the information is free. the kit is for parents who, after reading the framework, decide they want to walk around the nursery with a drop bottle tonight. one drop of fluoro-spec on the painted side of a plate. if it's lead, it glows green in seconds. no lab.
see the drip kit, $50 →