Protesters bring lead paint fight to Sherwin-Williams shareholder meeting

By Rachel Dissell, Brie Zeltner, The Plain Dealer
April 20, 2016
http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2016/04/protesters_bring_le...

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A small group of protesters held a provocative banner outside Sherwin-Williams' annual shareholders meeting Wednesday, part of an ongoing effort to pressure the paint company over use of lead in its products.

The group was led by San Francisco-based based Occupational Knowledge (OK) International, which aims to reduce workers' exposure to industrial pollutants in the developing world, and local non-profit Environmental Health Watch. Protesters said the paint company is poisoning children outside the United States by its continued use of lead in its industrial products and failure to adequately police licensees that make its residential paint in other countries.

The heavy metal, banned from use in residential paint in the United States in 1978 because it causes irreparable harm to the developing brains of children and can lead to learning disabilities, behavior problems, and lifelong health issues, is still used in industrial paints for durability and performance.

"We know that these paints, whether they say they're industrial or residential, they end up in homes all around the world," said David Jacobs, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating center for healthy housing in the United States. "The research is pretty overwhelming,"

Jacobs and Perry Gottesfeld, head of OK International, each bought a single share of Sherwin-Williams stock in order to attend Wednesday's meeting and question the company on the issue. Gottesfeld, who has decades of experience in lead abatement, and Jacobs, who served as director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1995 to 2004, have testified as expert witnesses in lead paint litigation.

Jacobs said he asked when Sherwin-Williams would comply with the United Nations and World Health Organization initiative to ban the production of new lead paint, an effort the company has said it supports.

In response, Sherwin-Williams told The Plain Dealer that the protesters are deliberately misleading the public with their arguments.

In an emailed statement, the company said it does not produce lead-based residential paint for sale anywhere. That's technically true.

Sherwin-Williams stopped producing lead-based residential paint for sale in the United States in 1937, and the company doesn't now add lead to residential paint to sell abroad.

It does, however, allow 16 licensees in other countries to sell Sherwin-Williams brands of residential paint, including Dutch Boy. And these companies are in charge of picking who supplies them with ingredients for that paint.

Last year, researchers from the University of Cincinnati and IPEN, an international non-governmental organization network, found lead at 360 times the acceptable limits in the Dutch Boy residential paint produced and sold by one of those licensees, Lebanon-based ChemiPaint.

Sherwin-Williams said it subsequently tested that paint and found that five of nine samples were above acceptable limits for lead content. The company traced the lead to a pigment from a Chinese supplier that ChemiPaint had used in the Dutch Boy paint, despite an "ironclad agreement" the licensees sign saying they'll manufacture paint without adding lead.

The licensee has since agreed to no longer use this supplier, and Sherwin-Williams has tested the paint again and found it to contain no lead, or lead at acceptable levels, according to the company.

Sherwin-Williams said it tests these paints for safety and compliance "at least annually" but did not provide an exact schedule for the testing, and would not provide results for any of the other paints produced by its licensees.

The licensees are located in a number of countries, including Haiti, Thailand, Indonesia, El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala, and Peru, among others.

Relying on these companies and their governments to do the right thing isn't enough, the protesters argue.

"We've dealt with families for over 35 years trying to prevent this issue," said Kim Foreman, executive director of Environmental Health Watch. "There's only so much we can do if they're going to continue to poison children globally."

Industrial versus residential

Sherwin-Williams, like many other paint companies, manufactures industrial paints that contain lead. The company says these make up a tiny portion of their overall sales, though; only 468 of their 147,000 paint formulas contain lead above the acceptable limits, and all are for industrial or automotive use.

The company, and others, also argue that this type of paint is not readily available to the public because it's expensive and is usually only distributed to specialized customers.

Protesters said it's foolish to think that paint companies have complete control over these hazardous products once they've let go of them. And studies have turned up some of this industrial paint in hardware stores in countries outside the United States, without hazard labels.

Peggy Kacerek, 77, of Bedford, joined the small group outside the shareholder's meeting because she said she's worried about exposure to lead both locally and internationally.

"They can't control where these products end up," she said. "I'm concerned that they're trying to brush it off."

Robert Wells, Sherwin-Williams' senior vice president of public relations, said that the company supports the World Health Organization's Lead Paint Alliance, which "recognizes the need for using hazardous chemicals in some industrial applications."

"The World Health Organization believes that's not where our focus should be, in trying to eliminate lead in paint," he said. "Taking lead out of industrial paints, while it may be the focus of OK International, it's not the focus of anyone else involved in protecting children from paint-based lead hazards."

Since 2010, 120 countries have signed on to the World Health Organization's alliance, whose stated goal is to phase out all lead in paint and to educate paint companies about suitable alternatives.

"I think they're basically stonewalling, saying they're not going to change, despite their record earnings and profits," Jacobs said. "There's no financial reason for them to use lead in paint, and we know that there are substitutes readily available.

"We're not going away and we intend to continue this battle, not just with Sherwin-Williams but with other paint companies that continue to persist in producing a known hazard to our children."