in 1978 lead-based paint was banned for residential use in the US. This implies that as of that date, other (non-residential) applications would still be permitted to use lead-based paint.
Is that still the case? I vaguely recall seeing, maybe 20 years ago, high-temperature spraypaint (for painting automotive exhaust headers) that contained lead. Are those sorts of things still available, or have more stringent lead-paint bans been put in effect since 1978?
A related question, have they yet produced anything the works as good as lead based paint? There’s a lot of old traffic signals that have original lead paint from the 1950s thorugh 1970s, while some of the newer ones the paint is already half peeled off after only a decade or two.
Good question. I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be massively surprised if it was still OK for certain applications, since there’s very little chance of a toddler eating paint chips from exhaust headers, for instance.
If these paints do exist, the manufacturers probably have to err on the side of caution and be relatively positive that the paint will not be used in a residence, somehow or another. Selling only to professionals, etc.
White lead is certainly still used as a pigment (artists can still obtain flake white paint, for example), but I couldn’t give you a list off the top of my head. I’d expect that there are quite a few applicatoins where the alternatives (e.g. titanium white) aren’t suitable.
List of possibly toxic oil paint pigments. Other than flake white, I don’t think I’ve seen any of these, except for my dad’s stash of ancient dried up tubes. Some oil paint is available in the regular version or as a “hue”; the hues are generally cheaper, have less toxic ingredients, but don’t cover quite as well.