"It's just imprudent to put a product as manifestly hazardous as asbestos in material such as crayons."

May 23, 2000 3:52 PM

"It's just imprudent to put a product as manifestly hazardous as asbestos in material such as crayons." Uhhh...what he said.
posted by ajh (5 comments total)

reason number 3 not to eat crayons
I wish someone told me about this before
posted by starduck at 4:06 PM on May 23, 2000

As I understand it, only the dust is a hazard so they use it in various household items. since it's in the wax it doesn't become dust and thus is never a health hazard (unless you burn your crayons i suppose). an interesting thing about hazardous materials (this is heresay): most materials in existing buildings is not dust-generating so much of the removal of asbestos potentially creates more of a hazard than not. (this is 2'nd hand info from Chem faculty:) in the old chemistry building at the UW the structure is so radioactive that it would require a tremendous expense to cleanup so what they do is paint the facility frequently et cetera which cuts down on the exposure people get when attending their daily chem class--so it's cheaper to maintain the structure than remove AND replace it. I can remember in the physics class, my instructor INSIDE the room had a geiger counter pointed at the ceiling and it was going off like crazy INSIDE the structure. We get so much more radiation just from living under the sun than we do from all our xrays, etc combined.......
posted by greyscale at 7:22 PM on May 23, 2000

To elaborate on greyscale's previous comment, it seems that only inhalation of asbestos is dangerous, since that is the disease vector for asbestos-related lung cancer and asbestosis. Crayons would seem to be harmless and I don't know of a single case of a child having a reaction to asbestos in crayons.

That said, these companies should be flogged for being so stupid as to keep using asbestos, even if the only risk is to their own public image.

posted by mikewas at 8:32 PM on May 23, 2000

> No one could point to any study that has examined the asbestos contamination of crayons, but everyone interviewed agreed that asbestos at any level should not be in products that children play with.

> The dangers of asbestos are well known. Tens of thousands of miners, shipyard and construction workers and their family members have died of asbestos-caused diseases.

Yep, I see all those kids grinding their crayons up into powder and breathing them, 8 hours a day.

What fuckin' miserable 'journalism'.
posted by baylink at 9:06 PM on May 23, 2000

What are crayons made of? Wax.
What are candles made of? Wax.
Many children make this connection, and burn their crayons. I remember using a lighter to melt crayons on a rock. They put out a lot of smoke, which I suppose I breathed a lot of.
I hope there were no asbestos in those crayons.
BTW, due to the danger of inhaling them, asbestos were banned in America, but thanks to NAFTA and the WTO, that ban was overturned because it interfered with free trade. And that's how we wind up with asbestos in crayons. Yet another reason to join the protest movement.
posted by wiremommy at 9:30 AM on May 24, 2000