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.
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers