Lead in LEGO bricks

Question

I have a set of LEGO bricks from Denmark and they were made in the late 1960's; should I be concerned about my son playing with them because of any danger of lead in the product?

Answer 1

No, you should not be concerned about lead. LEGO has always used lead-free colors in their elements, even back in the beginning.

However, not all LEGO-compatible bricks are lead free. For example, Mega Bloks, which are made in China, suffered from the poor quality control that led to massive recalls over lead-tainted products a few years ago.

David Clerk, the magazine's publisher and the executive director of Les Editions Protégez-Vous, said that after consulting with Health Canada, the magazine hired an independent lab in Quebec to perform what he called a "total lead test" on 32 toys, including the Maxi blocks.

Essentially, the process involves scraping off a sample of the toy's plastic, dissolving it in acid and then analyzing the solution.

When the results were returned by a lab, which Clerk said he could not identify because of a confidentiality agreement, a yellow Maxi block was the only toy that exceeded the 600-parts-per-million limit for lead set by Canada and the United States. Blue and red Maxi blocks showed no lead at all.

For confirmation, the magazine tested a second yellow block. It contained 1,180 parts per million of lead, nearly double the initial result.