An assortment of Stanley Quenchers.
Stanley is responding to claims that its products contain lead, clarifying that yes, lead is used in the manufacturing process, but the product needs to become damaged in order to expose the lead, a Stanley spokesperson tells TODAY.com in a statement.
On the bottom of each quencher made by the beverage container powerhouse is a circular barrier made of stainless steel, which covers a pellet that contains lead, a spokesperson for Stanley explains. The pellet seals the product's vacuum insulation, and it is not accessible unless the stainless steel barrier comes off — which is possible but “rare,” the Stanley spokesperson notes.
“Our engineering and supply chain teams are making progress on innovative, alternative materials for use in the sealing process,” the spokesperson adds. In a separate statement to NBC affiliate WCNC, the company said all of its products follow all U.S. regulatory requirements.
In a recent flurry of social media posts, some Stanley customers say they are using at-home tests to assess if there’s lead in any of their Stanley products, to mixed results (though it’s often not clear what part of the cup is being tested and the quality of lead test being used).
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TODAY.com spoke with multiple experts and government officials to understand why lead exposure is so dangerous and how contamination generally occurs.
Do Stanley cups contain lead?
Yes, Stanley uses lead in its manufacturing process for its cups, but they only pose a risk of lead exposure if the cover on the bottom of the tumbler comes off and exposes the pellet used to seal the cup's vacuum insulation, a Stanley spokesperson says. (If this happens, you can submit a claim through the company's lifetime warranty.)
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The liquid inside a Stanley mug does not come in contact with the pellet, so there’s little to no chance of lead exposure from drinking liquid inside the container. The risk is if the circular cover comes off and someone touches the exposed lead and then touches their mouth or nose, experts say.
Lead poisoning activist Tamara Rubin, aka Lead Safe Mama, first brought attention to the presence of lead in Stanley tumblers in March 2023. (Rubin earns a commission on the products she recommends that are purchased through her website. Some of her recommendations include competitors to Stanley.)
She's been passionate about protecting other parents from the dangers of lead poisoning ever since her then-7-month-old son became exposed to lead paint dust during a home renovation and suffered severe permanent brain damage. Rubin now advocates against the use of lead in any products that enter the home. In February 2023, she sent Consumer Reports a tip based on her own lead testing that later led to a product recall. She has also submitted reports to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) on similar products that she says led to four additional recalls.
Related: The right and wrong way to clean a Stanley cup, according to experts
Rubin says parents often send her items that they suspect could contain lead, and she uses XRF technology, the same $35,000 spectrometer instrument used by the CPSC, to test for the presence of lead and other heavy metals. She says she’s tested several Stanley tumblers that people have sent her after the protective cover at the bottom has come off, and she has found lead.
“Though some people say (the) protective disc doesn’t come off easily, I’ve heard from many people who say that for them it has,” Rubin says, estimating that the latter group is in the hundreds.
She adds that, based on her own experience and what other parents have told her, heavy use, children fidgeting with the area and repeated washings can increase the likelihood the cover will come off. She says some people have told her they don't know how the cover came off and weren't even aware the cup was damaged at first.
The risks of lead exposure and poisoning
Lead is a naturally occurring metal found abundantly throughout the earth, per the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Soil usually contains lead concentrations of less than 50 parts per million, but many urban areas contain soil with up to 200 parts per million, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A relatively inexpensive, durable and stable metal that doesn’t rust, lead was once used en masse during the early-to-mid 1900s and could be found in toys, gasoline, food, jewelry, cooking utensils, ceramics, electronics, batteries, plumbing pipes, paint and even cosmetics.
Federal and state laws have since helped lower the amount of lead people are exposed to, but lead is still found in some products today. In fact, the CDC tracks lead-related product recalls, from children’s clothing to food to cosmetics to medicine.
“Most people think of lead poisoning as a thing of the past, but lead is still all around us, often at dangerous enough levels to cause significant harm,” Jenna Forsyth, Ph.D., research scientist specializing in epidemiology and environmental science at Stanford University School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com.
Lead poisoning is most commonly caused by breathing in lead dust or particles, but it can also occur by touching a surface where lead is present, then touching one’s nose or mouth, thereby ingesting trace amounts of the toxic metal, according to the CDC.
“One family I worked with had a young child who got lead poisoning from ingesting oatmeal that he had playfully smashed with the bottom of a water bottle where lead was exposed,” says Rubin. (This bottle was not made by Stanley.)
Once lead enters the bloodstream, it can accumulate and cause severe health consequences, including cardiovascular disease and brain damage. Ronnie Levin, a 40-year veteran scientist of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who now teaches at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, tells TODAY.com that lead is an “all-systems toxin. ... There isn’t a system in your body — from your nervous system to your immune system to your reproductive system — that isn’t harmed by it.”
One study published in The Lancet estimates that in 2019, more than 5 million adults worldwide died from cardiovascular disease related to lead exposure. Children are especially vulnerable because they absorb lead more easily than adults.
“Even low levels of lead that were once considered safe have been linked to harmful changes in intelligence, behavior and health,” Paul Allwood, the lead poisoning prevention and surveillance branch chief at the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, tells TODAY.com in an email.
Does this mean I should get rid of my Stanley cup?
As long as that cover at the bottom of your Stanley cup stays in place, Levin says there is no risk in owning the product. “If that barrier remains intact, you won’t be exposed to any lead and won’t suffer any negative outcomes,” she explains.
What's more, health issues rarely arise from a single instance of lead exposure. “Repeated exposure to lead is what’s most worrisome,” Dr. Vicki Iannotti, a pediatrician at ColumbiaDoctors in Tarrytown, New York, and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University, tells TODAY.com.
It’s that kind of repeated exposure that concerns Rubin the most. “Children, and especially babies, like to fidget with things that have dimples they can rub,” she says. “If a parent lets their child fidget with an item like a Stanley mug after the bottom cap has come off, there is a very possible and likely transference of microparticulate lead via normal hand-to-mouth behavior in young children.”
Levin echoes similar concerns: “Though lead poisoning is unlikely to happen from a single instance, if a child puts the bottom of one of these cups against their mouth or rubs the surface with their fingers and then puts them in their mouth, contamination can occur.”
Forsyth agrees that risk of exposure from a single instance of touching lead “is pretty low,” but says there are scenarios that could increase the risk, such as scraping the exposed led against a hard surface. For example, if a cup with exposed lead is slid across a counter or moved in and out of a cupholder with hard edges, then “tiny pieces of lead could flake off," she says.
And when lead comes in contact with anything acidic, it can become more absorbable, Forsyth explains. This could occur if you're drinking out of a cup with exposed lead and peeling an orange, then touch the exposed lead with fingers that have touched the orange, and then touch your nose or mouth. “Ingesting lead is what you need to avoid the most,” Forsyth says.
So, keep an eye on the bottom of your Stanley cup to make sure that cover stays where it’s supposed to be. And if the cover does come off and exposes the seal containing lead, customers can submit a claim under the product’s lifetime warranty.
Do other insulated tumblers contain lead?
Stanley is not alone in using lead-containing pellets to seal its insulated cups. The Stanley spokesperson says in the statement that the pellet the company uses is “industry standard.” And Rubin says that she’s tested bottles from other companies that make insulated cups with similar pellets covered in a similar fashion to Stanley.
It’s important to note that the CPSC monitors products, including insulated tumblers, for violating lead regulations and has recently recalled several children’s products for having accessible pellets that contain levels that exceed the federal lead content ban, CPSC press secretary Patty Davis tells TODAY.com. Examples include products sold by PandaEar, Cupkin, Tiblue, Klickpick, and Laoion.
Davis encourages consumers to report any lead-related concerns they have for any product currently on the market to the CPSC at www.saferproducts.gov. “Each report is reviewed and could potentially lead to a recall,” she says.
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