Achievements & Highlights 

• Over 80 volunteers provided GLASS as a service to the public in this 6 month period

• GLASS handled & data-entered 2,462 calls (emails & phone calls) in the 6 months from Dec ’05 to May ’06 and 2,099 calls for the nearly 6 months of the calendar year to date in 2006

• GLASS calls to date in 2006 came from: NSW 998 calls (48% of total), Overseas 583 (28%), Vic 185 (9%), ACT 122 (6%), Qld 109 (5%), WA 61 (3%), SA 32 (2%), Tas 7 calls & NT 2 calls

• GLASS distributed to date in 2006, 929 copies of information products published by the Department of Environment and Heritage (DEH) for a total of 20,853 since 1998

• Subjects most often discussed in calls in this period were: policy (eg answering the questions “when was lead paint banned?” or “when will lead petrol be phased out globally?” or “why don’t governments force hardware stores to distribute lead booklets?”, - 468 calls in 2006 year-to-date (19% of total call subjects), lead poisoning 368 calls (15%), consumer products 271 (11%), service referral 270 (11%), paint 250 (10%), lead workers 182 (7%), environmental testing/sampling 176 (7%), renovation 139 (6%) and other 125 (5%)

• This compares with subjects most often discussed since 1998: lead poisoning (19%), other (which includes demolition, smelter/mining issues etc) (13%), service referral (12%), paint (9%) and policy (8%)

• GLASS volunteers added 253 information products to the GLASS library database since 1st Dec 2005, making a total of 8,383 items in the library and no-one has yet refuted the claim that this is the largest lead library on the planet

• The manager has prepared a special Case File about our assistance to one new client in this period – a Peruvian doctor who is trying to help a smelter community of 35,000 lead poisoned people

• There were 119,050+ page hits from 154 countries in the 6 months between Nov 01, 2005 and Apr 30, 2006 on www.lead.org.au but the counter can’t go above 20,002/month