Several environmental and public organizations in Russia have raised concerns over the safety of coatings on the domestic market, following a scandal occurring when a property management company had been found using enamel with extremely high lead content in residential buildings.

In order to perform major capital works in a residential building, a local property management company in the city of Orsk in Orenburg Oblast, Russia picked up a coating with the lead content of 13,000 ppm, Russian public organization Council of Mothers said in a statement on its website. There are numerous scientific researches showing that such high lead content could negatively affect humans, causing numerous cardiovascular issues, problems with the gastrointestinal tract and in some cases even infertility, Council of Mothers warned.

“Lead is attributed to the most hazardous substances. According to the WHO’s website, there are safe levels of lead content,” Tatiana Butskaya, chairman of the Council of Mothers said.

Some local residents started protesting against the use of the potentially dangerous coatings, but the property management company refused to change the enamel to an environmentally-friendly one, international ecological organization Bellona reported.

In the end, the coating was replaced, but only because the local residents managed to prove that it was not matching to the federal fire resistant standards and for this reason could not be used on the escape routs, Bellona added.

This case is a “fortunate exception” from the common rule, as in most cases Russian citizens can do nothing with cheap coatings with high lead content that is being used everywhere, including in schools and kindergartens, according to the Council of Mothers.

“This means that children, while they are in the educational facilities are breathing the lead in, and this is an extremely discouraging fact. According to the expert community and the Council of Mothers, Russia needs to introduce stricter requirements in regard to the safety of coatings,” Tatiana Butskaya said.

Basically, the relatively safe level of lead content in coatings in the world is considered at 90 ppm. In Russia, there is a federal law ‘On Safety of Coatings’ that allows production and further use of coatings with the lead content up to 5,000 pmm, according to Bellona. Nevertheless, there is evidence that even this extremely high rate in Russia in many cases is being exceeded.

In 2016, a group of ecological organizations in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia conducted large-scale research on the lead content in coatings in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It turned out that 49 percent of collected samples of various coatings available on the local markets had a lead content above 600 ppm, with 13 percent having a lead content above 5,000 ppm and six percent, above 10,000 ppm.

The Council of Mothers said it was especially concerning that no company was putting information about the lead content on the label, simply because the laws didn’t force manufacturers to do that. In most cases, it is unknown how much lead some coatings may contain, as such sort of researches are very rare in the country and many manufacturers in Russia prefer to not disclose that information.

Phasing out lead

It is believed that the negative effect that lead may cause in a human body requires no further evidence. In a 2015 research, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that the chronic exposure of lead caused 494,500 deaths and 9.3 million disability-adjusted life years due to long-term effects on health in the world, primarily in the low and middle-income countries.

In addition, it was also estimated that lead exposure accounted for 12.4 percent of the global burden of idiopathic developmental intellectual disability, which means intellectual disability not due to known causes such as genetic factors, 2.5 percent of the global burden of ischemic heart disease and 2.4 percent of the global burden of stroke.

Olga Ponisova, executive director of the Russian ecological organization Eco-Soglasiye commented that the maximum allowable lead content in coatings differs from one country to another. Ponisova said that in the countries of the Eurasia Economy Union, including Russia, the maximum allowable level was set at 5,000 ppm, which was considered safe, although this was significantly higher as compared to the levels set in other countries.

Over the past few years, the concerns over the widespread use of lead in coatings has been continually been raised not only in Russia but also in Belarus and Ukraine. In particular, Eugene Lobanov, director of Belarus Center of Ecological Solutions called local coating manufacturers to enhance control over lead content in raw materials. Lobanov also advised those companies that manufactured coatings without lead content to put the information about that on the label and asked retailers to actively promote those products among the customers.

“For manufacturers that decided to replace pigments containing lead to lead-free ones the additional costs would only slightly increase the final price of their products. The production costs increase by five percent to 10 percent. In this regard, the most important thing is the public perception that could make coatings with high lead content non-demanded, and hence non-competitive,” said Oleander Brichko, director of the Ukraine Association of Coatings Manufacturers.

Ukraine may become the first country in the post-Soviet space setting the maximum allowable content of lead at 90 ppm. The relevant draft decree has been prepared by the Ukraine Association of Coatings Manufacturers and is currently under consideration of the government agencies. It is not known how the new standards would impact the industry, but some forecasts say that by adopting that draft regulation, Ukraine could expand its opportunities in the area of coatings export to the European Union.

Old habits die hard

So far, there are no signs that any new regulations regarding the lead content in coatings could be adopted in Russia. The Ministry of Industry and Trade has not provided any comments on this issue by press time.

Gennady Averyanov, director of Russia’s Coatings Producers Association Centrlak, said that all coatings on the domestic market are subjected to state control, while the Russian Health Ministry set the quality requirements for coatings, including in terms of lead content, in accordance to the common global standards.

“In particular, it is prohibited to use coatings with any lead content indoors,” Averyanov stressed. “Russian Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology and Centrlak do not receive any major proposal or suggestions in regard to changing approaches to the establishment of safety requirements for coatings,” Averyanov added.

Basically, it is believed that local coatings manufacturers would not refuse from using lead voluntarily. Speaking in an interview some time ago, Elena Boguslavskaya, chairman of the environment-protection department of the Belarus coatings manufacturer Lakokraska, stressed that if manufacturers could refuse from using lead-containing pigments, they would have down that by that time. Boguslavskaya added that without these pigments the production costs of coatings would significantly grow.

Over the past several years, various public organizations have been warning that it was actually the state procurement system in Russia that allowed the local coating manufacturers to produce cheap products with the high lead content. The problem is that the price in Russia is the main criteria of choosing the winner of competitive bidding procedures, and for this reason, cheapest coatings with high lead content are being used in schools, hospitals and in many other places.

“Today, the Russian law [On State Procurement Programs] provides that, when making purchases, government organizations should be guided by how cheap the product is,” said Andrey Kutepov, member of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament.

“There are numerous cases in which it is simply necessary to introduce additional criteria for the selection of suppliers of goods, works and services because the absence of such criteria affects the life and health of an unlimited number of citizens,” Kutepov added.

At the moment, the Federation Council is considering amendments that would introduce some additional criteria to the state procurement programs for the children camps in Russia. If approved, the amendments would give the managing companies some freedom of maneuver, when choosing coatings.

“In future, it is necessary to revise the law on public procurement programs as a whole, so that in any sphere it would be possible to attract a supplier that would be able to provide products and service of proper quality and in time, rather than just at the lowest cost,” Kutepov said.

There is a certain category of citizens that purchase the cheapest coatings, not worrying about any lead content and possible harm to health, commented a source in the Russian coating industry who wished to not be named. In the past few years, the demand for these types of coatings was at the same level or even was slightly up, because the purchasing power of the Russian citizens continues falling for several years in a row, and price matters often more than anything else, he added. 

The presence of lead in Russian coatings is a fact that is well-known to everyone, including lawmakers for many years, so it is hard to imagine there would be any fast developments in this area now, the source said.