One in Four US Households Likely Exceed New Soil Lead Guidance Levels
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lead exposure has blighted communities across the United States (and the globe), with much of the burden resting on lower income communities, and communities of color. On 17 January 2024, the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) lowered the recommended screening level of lead in residential soils from 400 to 200 parts per million. Our analysis of tens of thousands of citizen-science collected soil samples from cities and communities around the US indicates that nearly one quarter of households may contain soil lead that exceed the new screening level. Extrapolating across the nation, that equates to nearly 30 million households needing to mitigate potential soil lead hazards, at a potential total cost of 290 billion to $1.2 trillion. We do not think this type of mitigation is feasible at the massive scale required and we have instead focused on a more immediate, far cheaper strategy: capping current soils with clean soils and/or mulch. At a fraction of the cost and labor of disruptive conventional soil mitigation, it yields immediate and potentially life-changing benefits for those living in these environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it