Unless you actually chew the cables, very little actual risk. I would be more worried about drinking water from a system still containing lead pipes. They still exist in a surprisingly large amount of places in the USA.
lead paint. there's still a ton of it around. most of it is covered by other paint, but when it chips, you still get exposure (and kids absolutely will eat paint flakes). also fun tip: if you want to get out of a lease early, you can ask your landlord to do a test for lead paint. if the building is >50 years old, the landlord is unlikely to want to take the risk of $10000s of renovation or having to disclose the lead to future tenants
Lead is naturally in tons of rocks. It's in a ton of other industrial processes, and it's still the most common material for sewer mains - most are reinforced with resin by now, but shifts can still cause major cracks that will let lead in.
There's still a ton of real uses for lead - we'd probably be better off if our electronics were still full of it, because they'd last longer.
Electronics lifespan seems to be limited by obsolescence, then battery wear, then switches, then connectors, with various random other stuff mixed in.
I don't see a lot of stuff failing anymore. Consumer stuff is all pretty good. I don't know about high performance stuff, maybe gaming GPUs get hot and fatigue the solder it something, but the more common stuff seems to get replaced before it failsn
Water, paint chipping, air pollution from coal power plants.
Don’t get me wrong, it would be good to phase out these cables especially the ones in the ground which contaminate the soil. But let’s not imagine they are a very significant problem. I’m actually annoyed by the article because it gives the actual significant lead emitters - coal burning power plans - some kind of cover up.
My house has lead service pipes and we test it annually. Because the people running our city water supply aren’t criminally incompetent, the water chemistry is such that there’s virtually no contamination.
