★ data source · CPSC · CC-BY-SA 4.0
US consumer product safety commission recalls
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.
492measurements
484unique products
40countries of origin
10categories
1973–2026year span
what this source covers
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.
categories this source contributed to
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.
toys
247 measurements (59.5%) →
painted toys, jewelry kits, plastic figurines. CPSC recalls plus EU safety-gate alerts.
paint
86 measurements (20.7%) →
house paint, art paint, industrial coatings. pure earth global surveys lead the count.
cookware
40 measurements (9.6%) →
aluminum pots, ceramic-coated pans, painted dishes, glassware. mostly imported, mostly via store-shelf surveys.
jewelry
20 measurements (4.8%) →
fashion jewelry, costume metal, kids charm bracelets. some items are nearly pure lead.
electronics
11 measurements (2.7%) →
cables, chargers, holiday lights. mostly EU safety-gate alerts on solder and PVC.
food (other)
5 measurements (1.2%) →
rice, cereals, candies, sauces. anything edible that is not baby food or spice.
supplements
2 measurements (0.5%) →
vitamins, herbal supplements, ayurvedic remedies. lead contamination from soil and processing.
candy
2 measurements (0.5%) →
mostly imported candies tested by NYC. tamarind candies and chili-based sweets dominate.
cosmetics
1 measurements (0.2%) →
kohl, surma, sindoor, lipstick, eye shadow. some traditional cosmetics test as nearly pure lead compounds.
religious & ceremonial
1 measurements (0.2%) →
sindoor, kumkum, holy powders, religious medals. used in worship, often imported, often very high in lead.
methodology & license
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
back to the hub
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.