Sure, the lead may cross one or two layers of cloth and migrate from the pocket to your skin and bite you.
More considerate would be to provide the card in a protecting sleeve (that would protect from all the bad, bad substances it may contain) or just use a good, ol' plain paper business card, posibly printed with "bioetical" ink.
>You get it on your hands and then ingest it when you eat. (People don't usually wash their hands after touching a business card.)
I was referring to the parent poster that talked of people putting them in their pockets.
Anyway, ROHS (or lead-free) is a good thing, but it is not like you get lead poisoning (or saturnism) because of the once in your lifetime you touched sometthing contained lead and then - if you eat with your hands - you managed to ingest it:
You need to drink from lead or lead soldered tap water or water contaminated by lead to become poisoned by lead.
In the case of the Linux business card the exposed surface that would eventually contain a minimum amount of lead - pre-ROHS soldering tin contained in the common eutectic Sn-Pb alloy 37% lead - is in the below 1 square mm range.
You would nead to actually lick hundreds or thousands of such cards to ingest any meaningful amount of lead.
And lead free soldering tin may contain (in minimal amounts):
I wish I could find a source on this, but when my 12mo got his routine lead test, his lead levels were elevated. It was then that I learned that even "safe" levels of lead can (it appears, inconclusively) result in long term permanent changes: reduced IQ, increased aggression.
I will forever feel guilt about letting him play in the yard as a baby (my best guess as to where it came from) and take other efforts to reduce the lead in his environment.
Depending on your life situation, it may be impractical if not impossible to reduce the lead in your environment. I am open to being further educated on this subject, but it seems like reducing lead in all products that will be handled by people is a net benefit for getting to home environments that will not cause brain damage to the infants that live in them.
> I was referring to the parent poster that talked of people putting them in their pockets.
Right, but how are you going to put it in your pocket without touching it with your hands?!
>You would nead to actually lick hundreds or thousands of such cards to ingest any meaningful amount of lead.
Lead poisoning is cumulative, so you want to avoid ingesting even very small amounts. I doubt that good data is available regarding the amount of lead that would be ingested in this scenario or its potential effects. Best to be cautious. Lead free solder is not expensive.
More considerate would be to provide the card in a protecting sleeve (that would protect from all the bad, bad substances it may contain) or just use a good, ol' plain paper business card, posibly printed with "bioetical" ink.