The EcoWaste Coalition today prodded the customs authorities to tighten controls to bar the entry of paint products that do not conform with the country‘s strict lead paint regulation.
The toxics watchdog group‘s plea for stringent customs checks for paint imports came on the heels of its fresh discovery of 13 aerosol paints from abroad that tested with dangerously high concentrations of lead.
According to the group, these 13 spray paints with lead content up to 56,100 parts per million (ppm) are being sold to uninformed consumers by offline and online retailers in blatant disregard of the country’s regulation banning lead above 90 ppm in paints.
“The authorities need to act with dispatch to ensure that these dangerous products are removed from the market and returned to their suppliers for environmentally sound disposal,” said Thony Dizon, Chemical Safety Campaigner, EcoWaste Coalition.
“The Bureau of Customs, with guidance from concerned health and trade regulators, can stop the entry of non-compliant paint products by strengthening import controls,” he added.
The latest market investigation conducted by the group amid the COVID-19 pandemic netted 13 more spray paints with exceedingly high levels of lead that can present a serious health hazard over time.
Of the 13 spray paints bought from offline and online dealers by the group and submitted to the SGS, a leading testing company, for lead content analysis, 10 were found to contain dangerously high levels of lead exceeding 10,000 ppm. Also, eight of the 13 paints lacked information about their manufacturers.
This brings the total number of imported lead-containing aerosol paints uncovered by the group to 50, noting its discovery of 37 violative products last year that were subsequently banned by the authorities. None of these 50 violative products was produced by companies belonging to the Philippine Association of Paint Manufacturers (PAPM).
The EcoWaste Coalition had notified the authorities about its latest findings. It had also reached out and requested retail stores to take the violative products off the shelves.
“Lead paint chips and dust are formed when a surface covered with lead paint ages, peels and breaks. Children are exposed to lead when they eat such paint chips or swallow or breathe in lead dust, which can affect their developing brains and cause reduced intelligence, learning ability and attention span, as well as increased risk of behavioral problems such as aggressiveness, bullying and violence,” said environmental health scientist Dr. Geminn Louis C. Apostol, Assistant Professor at the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health. “Health experts have not determined any level of lead exposure that is deemed safe and without detrimental effects.”
Recognizing that lead paint is a major source of childhood lead exposure, and that such exposure causes serious harm to children and other vulnerable groups like women of child-bearing age and workers, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) issued in 2013 a groundbreaking policy eliminating lead-containing paints.
With active support from the EcoWaste Coalition and the PAPM, the DENR promulgated Administrative Order 2013-24, or the Chemical Control Order for Lead and Lead Compounds, which, among other provisions, phased out lead-containing decorative paints in 2016 and lead-containing industrial paints in 2019.