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Techniques for CollectorsMinerals that contain lead

28th Jul 2019 00:50 UTCMatthew Droppleman

I have some minerals and were told that they contain 25 percent led (chemical makeup or whatever) are they any danger and how do I clean them properly without contaminating the environment?

28th Jul 2019 02:15 UTCBob Harman

It is important to distinguish between lead containing mineral specimens and lead in the environment.


Several common minerals contain lead, the most common of which probably is galena, lead sulfide (PbS). This mineral is heavy and the most important thing to remember is to not drop a large specimen on your foot. Same with other large heavy specimens.


Lead in the environment often comes from old lead plumbing or mining sites. Water contaminated with lead is truly dangerous, especially to pregnant women (the developing fetus), babies, and young children. Chronic hi blood lead levels often is associated with multiple health issues including mental retardation in children..


From mineral specimens containing lead, there should be little danger with occasional careful handling . This includes no grinding up or powdering of the specimen, not keeping specimens near food or where children might play with them. All common sense rules!


So, with routine careful handling and usual common sense safety precautions, there is no real danger collecting lead minerals. Cleaning an occasional small to medium size specimen in a well ventilated area using gloves and eye protection precautions also should not be a problem. Soapy water or vinegar followed by a thorough rinsing is no problem.


BTW, I am a retired MD pathologist and have dealt with some health issues due to lead problems in the past. CHEERS.....BOB

28th Jul 2019 06:28 UTCMatthew Droppleman

thanks

28th Jul 2019 06:29 UTCMatthew Droppleman

do I have to dispose of the container I clean them in?

28th Jul 2019 06:31 UTCMatthew Droppleman

I collect mainly quartz varieties so I’m out of my depth.

28th Jul 2019 17:50 UTCDonald B Peck Expert

No, your containers can live to clean other specimens in another day.

29th Jul 2019 01:22 UTCGareth Evans

As a retired research chemist in my day I handled some of the most toxic and carcinogenic organometallics known to man, especially the metal carbonyls. In retirement not much has changed! My children often say that everything I do is either dirty or dangerous. True! I do like to live life dangerously.


The amount of lead you would release into the environment washing your mineral specimens would be negligible compare with what the average smelter releases every hour – especially in China and India. It is important to exercise good safety practice, but it is also good to exercise common sense. I do not say this to be controversial. The safety NAZI’s (OH&S) have utterly destroyed some hobbies by disseminating misinformation. We are living in a ‘nanny state.’


I posed a question to the CDC some five years ago. I asked them to tell me how many people have died in the USA in the last century due to exposure to metallic arsenic? Death in this instance should include accidental, suicide and murder. The answer was: none!!!!


Some years ago a chap in the UK tried to commit suicide by ingesting 80 grams of Orpiment. After a few hours and still very much alive he decided to go the hospital to have his stomach pumped. The end result was the destruction of a nice mineral specimen only, and some follow up psychiatric counselling.

29th Jul 2019 01:59 UTCFrank K. Mazdab 🌟 Manager

Ah but Gareth, that fellow in the UK simply picked the wrong arsenic mineral to poison himself with. Had his chemistry education been more effective and thus had he selected arsenolite or claudetite instead, the outcome may have been quite different.

29th Jul 2019 02:20 UTCGareth Evans

You are so right. If he had chosen one of the oxygen group compounds he would have had multiple choices. He could have used H2O to drown himself. He could have used H2S to poison himself. He could have chosen H2Se or H2Te to kill himself - slower but the same outcome. This is why it is so important to be very specific about your poison. Elemental arsenic is not and I repeat is not the same as Orpiment, arsenolite or claudeite though they all contain arsenic in different oxidation states.


He could have chosen 11 grams of lead moving at 3000fps shot from a revolver and the lead would have killed him but for reasons other that it being lead.


It is about taking personal responsibility for your actions. We have bred two generations of young men and young women who feel it is their right to blame any misfortune that befalls them in life on some thing or someone other than themselves. It is my parents fault! It is the next-door neighbours fault! It is the mine manager’s fault! And so one and so forth infinitum!!


The reason mining companies are unwilling to let you collect minerals at their mine is not because they care about you. The mine manager is indifferent to your death or any injury that you might incur at their mine. They are scared of you or a member of your family suing them for millions on the grounds of negligence.


Let me tell you about an incident that happened at the MMM pit in Broken Hill some years ago. The company allowed a group of budding undergraduate geologists from the local University to visit the site. One member of the group had a keen interest in Broken Hill minerals. This person decided to re-visit the pit some hours after the official tour ended by sliding under the gate. He subsequently injured himself in the pit, and a very slick lawyer sued the company for compensation on the grounds that the company did not take sufficient steps to ensure the safety of their client. The gate was well marked – no trespassing allowed – dangerous area, but the gate could be breeched by sliding under it.

29th Jul 2019 21:01 UTCMatthew Droppleman

Thanks that makes me feel a bit better about being cautious, but to not be terrified of lead!

29th Jul 2019 22:37 UTCGareth Evans

Matthew:


Take a leisurely walk through the paint and home cleaning sections of your local hardware store or supermarket. You will find highly corrosive, highly toxic and highly flammable products that if misused could cause much mayhem and death.


The important thing is to know the risks . To have a good understanding of what you are using and how it should be used with care. The bottom line is that life is full of risks, but the benefits do indeed outweigh the risks involved.

30th Jul 2019 19:32 UTCDana Morong

For an interesting essay on lead poisoning, read (it's online, so search by these words) The Famous Benjamin Franklin Letter on Lead Poisoning. Interesting part about when someone told him that most of the problem came from workmen, who worked with lead, failing to wash their hands before eating, so that bits (dust) got into their food. Another interesting one was a house whose residents used roof water (presumably channeled to gutters, which may have been gasketed with lead, to barrels or to a cistern in cellar) for drinking. Apparently there was no problem for years, until some trees grew higher than the roof, and the tree leaves in the gutters when decayed had acid (if it were oaks, they'd have tannic acid, which can really dissolve metals) which then made the people sick. The acid had dissolved enough lead to make it soluble in the water.

The house I live in has copper pipes with lead-tin solder, but water tests show lead only well below the preferred limit (well within the 'safe' range). I suspect this is due to the 'hardness' of the water, which acts as a natural buffer (and also leaves deposits of calcium carbonate all over, including presumably the insides of the pipes). Naturally, if one ever kills the well bacteria by dumping bleach down the well (which is in some places a recommended procedure to do every ten or twenty years for old farm wells) this would change the chemistry of the water and might make it unsafe to drink for several weeks after such 'treatment' or at least until the chlorine worked its way through the system and out, and the system returned to previous chemical conditions.

More than the occasional naturally-radioactive minerals (although I would be careful to Not take a deep breath upon opening the box) I am more concerned about dusts and soluble compounds of heavy metals (cleanliness here being the answer), and especially of elemental mercury. One specimen (got as part of someone's micromount collection, which was kept in its entirety) was of mercury droplets on matrix, and that one I sealed in its little box with some cellophane tape all around the seam where the lid went on. I'll just have to view that one through the clear plastic lid - I'm not opening that one.

30th Jul 2019 20:16 UTCFrank K. Mazdab 🌟 Manager

Hi Dana,


one thing you might discover with the native mercury specimen, apart from of course the issue of its vapor, is that if you move it the mercury falls off. Many many years ago, I bought a native mercury on cinnabar specimen (Socrates mine, CA) by mail order, and it arrived in a plastic bag with the Hg mostly as a big dirty droplet in the bag. I painstakingly "repaired" the specimen by redistributing that loose blob into attractively-placed tiny droplets on the matrix. Unfortunately, I'll never know where the droplets existed on the original specimen (and presumably everyone from the original collector through every intermediate dealer did the same thing [hopefully with only the actual real Socrates Hg, and not with any additional broken-thermometer mercury to beef up the coverage!], so likely from the moment the first hammer struck the outcrop, the original Hg distribution on the sample was disturbed and lost).


In any case, once satisfied with my repair job, I dipped the whole sample in a dilute Elmer's glue solution. Once dried, it only barely changed the luster of the sample, and now I can safely pick it up to admire it, and the glue coating presumably also minimizes the ability of the vapors to diffuse out. And while I've never had reason to do so, the glue coating can be removed by soaking in water, in case I ever want to re-arrange my Hg droplets in some new aesthetic pattern.

30th Jul 2019 20:42 UTCAlfredo Petrov Manager

Frank, with mercury droplets on cinnabar from Spain, I never had any problem with them falling off, even if held upside down. I was told the field collectors spray the specimen with hair spray, but I don‘t know whether that‘s really true or not. If so, it perhaps reduces the evaporation of the Hg too.

30th Jul 2019 20:52 UTCFrank K. Mazdab 🌟 Manager

Spraying specimens still in the field with hairspray... that's clever!

31st Jul 2019 00:06 UTCMatthew Droppleman

Now I know my world domination plan!
 
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