P65 Warning

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

I wasn’t sure if this should be posted here or in General Questions. Feel free to move it.

My dog Huck (Great Dane) drinks a massive amount of water every day. His dishes are in a raised Neater Feeder which has openings for a food dish and water dish. The standard stainless steel water dish that came with the feeder is not large enough for him. We were using a plastic bucket instead, but every time I filled it up and was walking it to his feeder, I was thinking - if this handle lets loose, I’m going to have a huge mess. So I purchased a stainless steel bucket from Fleet Farm. It was in the farm animal supply area. It fits perfectly in his feeder and no more worries of a plastic handle breaking. As I was washing it one day, I noticed a sticker on the bottom with a P65 warning on it. I Googled it, and am still not sure if I should let him drink out of it anymore. Is this safe?

#2

I’ve seen prop 65 warnings on just about everything. I’m pretty sure that your Great Dane will die of something like old age, before anything in his stainless steel bucket is going to kill him.

#3

Some of those warnings are best taken with a shaker of salt.

#4

Stainless steel contains nickle and chrome, which are listed substances. Are you drinking tap water? If what you are putting in the bucket is etching the steel, you have bigger problems.

For stainless steel in particular, a lot of people decided that it was easier to put a p65 label on their steel, rather than to think about it. Since, unlike food, nobody cared about the p65 status of steel buckets, there was no downside.

But stainless steel is an alloy, not a compound. California has indicated that stainless steel is OK for dental braces, implants and body jewelry.

I haven’t seen your bucket: I don’t know if it’s actually ‘stainless steel’ or something else.

#5

The Prop 65 warning is what happens when you let the public make laws on things they don’t understand. Made more annoying by the fact that they don’t actually have to tell you what the chemical in question is so that you could actually see what the concern is with research. If I had to guess, since it’s a stainless steel, I’d say it’s the presence of nickel. Which, of course, is alloyed as part of the steel and isn’t about to leach out into water.

Quite frankly, the way Prop 65 is written and enforced, California would put a warning label on the Sun if it could.

#6

I’ll bet there are cancer causing chemicals in P65 warning labels. How come those don’t have P65 warning labels?

#7

Could be, but actually quite a lot of attention was put into moving away from traditional toxic inks to non-toxic inks, and toxic inks have largely been removed from the supply chain.

#8

If you’re following this thread on your cellphone, a Prop. 65 warning applies.

You’d think stainless steel woul be safer than a plastic bucket, which likely has negligible risks to begin with. Pluto drinks out of aluminum dog bowls, so he’s probably not long for this world. :frowning:

#9

There are huge penalties for not having that warning on something that needs it. There are no penalties at all for having that warning on something that doesn’t need it. And the standard for “is known to cause cancer” is extremely broad (it does not, for instance, require any known instance of ever causing cancer). So the net result is that the warning gets slapped on everything, and the net result of that is that everyone ignores the warning, and everyone ignoring it just means that it’s slapped on even more things. It’s a bad law overall, and really should be repealed entirely.

#10

The Proposition 65 warning was on a can of sardines I ate for breakfast yesterday. They were canned in Thailand.

#11

I looked closer at the labels on the bottom of the pail. It says “stainless steel” and “made in India”. And of course the P65 cancer warning label.