My cousins had a good-sized sandbox that we were invited over to play
in when I was growing up.
My most striking memory wasn't making sand
castles.
It was uncovering the cat-poop.
Large, open spaces of sand
attract all kinds of critters. The overlying tarp didn't do enough to
keep them out.
I didn't go
near that sandbox afterward.
These days you can buy some pretty nice sandboxes, with serious lids on them to keep the critters out.
What else?
Well, you may end up poisoning your child if you don't take some time to choose the right playsand.
Playsand
is one of those gray-area subjects: The kind where a lot of people get
together and raise an alarm and have their claims evaluated by the
government agency responsible for such things...and lose the
arguement.
In any situation where the government finds for an
industry over the people raising an issue, there are always leftovers.
Twenty years is a hell of a long time for something to simmer. These leftovers are over two decades old...and still have some chew on the bone.
The trouble lies with playsand--for the most part, it is NOT beach sand. It is ground quartz. Quarried along the coast, It makes a fine, white, powdery substance that's bagged up and sold in toy stores and hardware stores all over.
Even
concrete makers sell it--what the heck, it's from the same quarries.
The original debate goes back 20 years, originally centered around which form of tremolite is present in the sand. Back then, both sides acknowledged tremolite was a contaminant. One side argued that there were fibrous forms of the mineral in the sand--making it a health hazard. The other side said it was crystalline--and therefore a safer form of tremolite.
After listening to arguments by the Health Research Group--a division of Public Citizen that urged a recall or outright ban of the stuff--as well as arguments from the National Stone Association and others on behalf of the stone industry, The Consumer Product Safety Commission decided not to take action.
Other things surfaced. The International Agency for
Research on Cancer found that crystalline silica, an ingredient in most playsands, was carcinogenic to humans. The result? Bags containing crystalline silica bear a California Proposition 65 warning label: "This product contains crystalline silica, known to the State of
California to cause cancer and other substances which are known to the
State of California to cause cander, birth defects, and reproductive
harm."
No other state is calling out crystalline silica on warning labels.
One company make a playsand that is not quartz at all--their thought is that by avoiding the mineral all together one avoids the whole question. They use a variety of crushed feldspar. And they've got a
2003 Material Data Safety Sheet to back up their claims.
No reports exist of the disease in children exposed to silica-containing sand. And that's why the Consumer Product Safety Commission hasn't treated this like an emergency. However, as one researcher pointed out in 1988, ''This is a kind of hazard in children that doesn't manifest itself for 20 years, and then it's too late.''
If I were going to create a sandbox for the kids--or the grandkids--I'd focus on a couple things:
- Make sure I could lock the box down after the kids are finished.
- I'd change out the sand a couple of times in a season.
- I'd avoid sandbags that were blank. If I were selling this stuff, I'd sure as hell want my customers to know my sand is crystalline-silica free, or at minimum, not made from ground quartz.
This one says
no asbestos. It's a very nice webpage. Says all the right things. I'm sure the folks there beileve in their product. But it's still quartz. If I'm in a store and I find this, I'm heading over to the customer service desk to ask about alternatives.
Hopefully you won't get the boneheaded answer my neighbor got when she asked a local dealer about it.
She had a bag of playsand in her hands, and it was completely unmarked, as far as ingredients and warnings went. She asked the "do-you-want-fries-with-that" intellectual representing the store where the sand came from.
His answer? "I dunno. The desert?"
More on the subject:Here is a
1988 article published in the NYTimes.
National Geographic's
Green GuideHealthy Child Care's guide