California Supreme Court Reinforces Powerful Anti-Toxic Laws

(9 Dec., 1996 — Oakland) In its first opportunity to interpret California’s innovative anti-toxics law, Proposition 65, the state’s highest court today gave the law the widest possible scope, saying it was carrying out the will of the voters.

“Californians’ water supplies are now protected from the highest snowfield in the Sierra to the end of the kitchen faucet,” said David Roe, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) senior attorney and principal co-author of the ten-year-old law.

In a case attacking faucets that are made out of lead-containing brass, which leach lead into water drawn from the tap, a lower court had ruled that Proposition 65’s protections against drinking water contamination did not apply because faucets were not a “source” of drinking water that voters intended to cover when the law was passed as a ballot initiative in 1986. Today’s ruling by the California Supreme Court firmly reversed the lower court, saying that the law should receive a broad interpretation.

Related cases, brought by EDF and other environmental groups, have already succeeded in forcing national manufacturers to eliminate lead-containing brass from pumps and valves made for use in private wells. “This case should sound the death knell for lead in plumbing fixtures, not just here in California but nationwide,” said Roe. “A state law is doing what decades of federal law hasn’t: Getting rid of an unnecessary source of contamination of the natural resource that all of us use and depend on every day.”

The case, People v. Superior Court (American Standard) No. S047833, was brought by the California attorney general against major faucet manufacturers under Proposition 65 after an investigation and notice by several environmental groups led by the Natural Resources Defense Council.