Your Beautiful Kitchen Table is Filled With Poisonous Lead

By Meaghan O'Connell April 7, 2014

This story of how Justin Kazmark found out his dining room table — purchased a few years ago from the Conran Shop, in ABC Carpet and Home — was LACQUERED IN LEAD DUST and slowly poisoning his family is very alarming. He outlines the process of getting the product tested and recalled after his one-year-old’s lead levels came back terrifyingly high:

The next day, another employee of Conran reached out to say he would be conducting the follow up and said: “Unfortunately, at this immediate time I cannot accept any liability or responsibility for the situation you are in or the health of your son. The testing needed to confirm the lead dust as detailed in the report is from the actual materials used to construct the table has not been conducted and the results you have are not conclusive as to the origin of the dust, merely the location of the dust.”

He elaborated: “I do not believe, on the information I have so far and the quantity we sold worldwide, that the source of the lead is the table.” But he agreed to arrange for the table to be taken from our home, sent to a quality assurance laboratory, dismantled, and further tested.

All of the legal and bureaucratic hoops they had to jump through to get the product recalled is not surprising, but it’s scary to see how long the whole process took, considering how many people could have been affected in the meantime.

The good news is that a recall is underway (here it is), and they’ve alerted at least 70% of the table owners in the U.S. If you own Conran’s Pondicherry Table, know that “it tested at 180 micrograms of lead per square foot. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers floors testing for lead dust at greater than 40 micrograms per square foot to be hazardous.”

Photo via the Consumer Product Safety Commission

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