What is the reason behind California cancer warning labels? Literally everything seems to be causing cancer. I just bought a few s2s maple boards from a local lumber supplier and each one had a sticker saying it’s known to the State of California to cause cancer. A maple board? There’s no treatment or paint on it. It’s just a milled and poorly planed piece of lumber.
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Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.
some politicians wanted to look like they did something good by requiring that things that might possibly cause cancer be labeled, but made the rules so wide that everyone not wanting fines or risk being sued just put the label on everything to be on the safe side
who knows, you could turn that board into sawdust and smoke it
You can only be punished for not including it when you should.
There is no punishment for including it when you don’t have to. So the simplest thing for any company was just to place this on every product.
California has methods of bypassing the normal legislative process via citizen’s initiatives–essentially, get enough signatures on petitions and your proposition makes it to a general state ballot to be voted on in the next general election.
So a group felt that the politicians at the time were not doing enough to protect and/or inform citizens of potential carcinogens they were being exposed to, and thus put forward Prop 65. Which passed overwhelmingly, and that’s not surprising–I know if I saw a ballot option that said “Companies need to label things that cause cancer” (and you didn’t have your current knowledge of how things turned out), I probably would have voted for it as well.
But, of course, that list of things that cause cancer is pretty broad and found in so many things that it largely becomes useless.
For your specific example, I don’t know exactly all of what might trigger the warning, not being treated probably doesn’t matter, maple resin/sap may well naturally have cancer-causing compounds. However, looking through the list, I note that “Wood Dust” itself is listed as a known carcinogen (I presume in a manner similar to asbestos), so that alone would probably trigger the label.
It’s a totally foreseeable consequence of a state constitution that will let you make anything part of the constitution if you can get enough signatures to put a proposition on the ballot and get enough yes votes.
Like a lot of things it sounded good at the time as long as you didn’t think too hard about it.
Now unless someone wants to spend a lot of time and money to repeal it—very unlikely—we are stuck with it.
[We don’t have the longest one, though](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_constitutions_in_the_United_States)
So everything in the world can technically have a NFPA hazard rating attached to it. This is the red-blue-yellow diamond you see on chemicals. However, for the *vast* majority of materials that rating will he 0-0-0 and therefore it would be redundant. So it gets left off.
However, there is a problem with those kinds of rating systems: they rate acute danger, not chronic. A carcinogen is a chronic danger that you can get hurt by repeated exposure (unless it is a very strong one), so it isn’t represented well in simple labeling. SDS documents show it, but regular consumers don’t read those.
So California passes Prop 65, requiring all materials that could possibly give you cancer to be labeled as such.
However, everything will kill you. The range of chemicals that could possibly cause cancer is so incredibly broad that it becomes meaningless as a communicator of risk. It would be like saying that an electric heating pad and a lit firepit have the same level of burn danger.
[Wood dust causes cancer](https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/wood-dust). It turns out lots of things cause cancer. Prop 65 encourages companies to label everything that might cause cancer even when it’s only a danger at elevated, long term exposure levels.
I just want to drop this 99% Invisible episode that did a good big dive into how we got here with Prop65. Ultimately it means super well, but sloppy business practices of throwing it on everything have undermined it
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/warning-this-podcast-contains-chemicals-known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer-or-other-reproductive-harm/
As many have said, it is safer to label everything for companies.
On a side not though, technically the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) only classifies one substance as a group 4 carcinogen meaning it is probably not carcinogenic to humans. Caprolactum.
Everything else is either group 3 (Unclassifiable as to carcinogenicity in humans) or higher.
Idea was to use the market to encourage producers to manufacture less dangerous items. Require them to label, and they’ll have to either put the effort into producing safer versions of their products or suffer the competitive consequences of selling a maybe cheaper cancer causing version of an item.
Turns out the way companies procure products or inputs doesn’t make knowing what’s in them easy, and using and holding accountable suppliers that provide safe versions is more difficult and less profitable, so they just slap a warning on everything because the sticker is cheaper than accountable production and an overwhelmed consumer can’t make an intelligent choice.
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