Clif McLellan, director of toxicology services at NSF International (previously known as the National Sanitation Foundation), a nonprofit organization, says that the voluntary standards developed by his group are tough and that most national name-brand faucets adhere to them.
But regulators say that the Safe Drinking Water Act, which specifies the NSF protocol as a voluntary standard for leachability, contains a big loophole. Because the NSF standard is voluntary, it is almost impossible to enforce the law by bringing suit against contractors or suppliers who use devices that don’t meet the standard. “Our enforcement lawyers consider the problem with faucets and other endpoint devices to be so impossible to win that they don’t even try,” says another regulator who spoke off the record.
In 2001, chemist David Kimbrough with the Castaic Lake Water Agency, a California water wholesaler, reported that corrosion of brass fixtures and fittings can sometimes be a significant source of lead. He is currently investigating a development of several hundred homes that use PVC water pipes but still have lead problems. “The fixtures and fittings are the only possible source,” he says.
Kimbrough notes that when plumbing fixtures leach lead, water systems engineers may be forced to install complicated and expensive corrosion-control treatment at the plant, and this in turn can conflict with regulations that govern levels of disinfection chemicals and disinfection byproducts. The D.C. lead crisis also revealed such conflicts.
Last summer, the U.S. EPA held a workshop that covered some of these issues. But for the most part, the problem seems to be caught in a catch-22. “Right now, all we can do is cajole and coerce states to get tough with their codes,” says an EPA scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity.