Economic Implications of Lead Contamination

Lead contamination imposes substantial costs on society. Recent work has encouraged a broadening of our understanding of these costs, arguing for the inclusion not only of direct health care costs incurred in the treatment of lead exposure, but also the costs to treat adverse developmental and behavioral effects and indirect costs imposed on society through later life behavioral impacts. Current analyses yield remarkably high benefit-cost ratios of lead remediation, in the range of 10 to 200.