The Legislature is curbing lead and untested chemicals in children’s products.

When I first learned I was going to be a grandfather to twins a few years ago, I was overjoyed. But I was also a little fearful – two infants coming to visit my wife and I would mean double the trouble. I thought that once we made it to the toddler stage, we’d have our house sufficiently baby-proofed. New laws that were passed this legislative session, however, have shown me there’s a whole new range of concerns the public should have for protecting children, and many of them are hidden dangers.

The recalls last year of Thomas the Train toy engines led one of my colleagues to raise warning flags about the evidence of lead and other harmful chemicals used in the manufacture of children’s toys. Her young son had some of those toys and she worried he could have been exposed to lead poisoning. Her bill, which will become law next month, outright bans the manufacturing, distribution and sale of children’s products containing lead.

Lead is estimated to be one of the top health hazards to children in Maine, and not only from toys. If children ingest lead chips or dust from toys, paint, or household products, it can create toxic levels of lead in their blood and prevent full development of a child’s nervous system. Adults are not immune to the health hazards of lead, either, and expectant mothers can pass their exposure to their babies.

It’s estimated that 20,000 Maine children are exposed to harmful levels of lead each year. The exposure rate is so high because Maine has the third-oldest housing stock in the country, and since lead paint wasn’t eliminated until the 1970s, there’s a good chance that somewhere in these older homes, there’s lead paint present. That is the case in more than 350,000 Maine homes and apartment buildings.

Besides existing laws that require disclosure of lead paint when a home is sold, legislators passed additional legislation earlier in the session that requires landlords performing renovations in their buildings to provide sufficient notice to tenants before they do any work that might disrupt lead paint.

Lead is not the only toxic hazard facing our children and grandchildren in our homes.

It’s disturbing to know that of the 80,000 chemicals being used in products today, only about 10 percent have been tested for effects on humans. Looking again at toys, it’s even more of a concern that the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has only one toy tester and 15 inspectors on staff to check millions of toys at hundreds of ports of entry in the United States. Federal guidelines on these types of chemicals have not been updated since 1976, and the industry is largely unregulated.

We’re hoping to change some of that here in Maine.

Another new law passed during the last session will encourage more manufacturers of products that are exposed to kids to use safer alternatives in their products through testing products, collecting data and making regular updates to a list of which chemicals are dangerous. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection would then work with manufacturers to ensure that they disclose their use of those chemicals.

The law outlines a process the department can use to encourage manufacturers to start using safer alternatives. The data collection that these positions would undertake would also be shared as part of an information clearinghouse with other states, to help stem the sale of these toxic products nationwide.

While all of these new laws won’t make a difference overnight, they are certainly important to the future health and safety of our state. In fact, Congress is now looking at similar pieces of legislation because Maine and other states have taken the lead on eliminating toxic chemicals.

As Maine takes a stand to say that we want safer products, the rest of the nation will follow.

Rep. Lawrence Sirois, D-Turner, represents House District 96 – Turner, Hebron and Minot – in the Maine Legislature.