Originally Posted by
The Oberon
I sometimes wonder the same thing myself !
Some of us are old enough to add to that list,
Carbon tetrachloride (CTC), the forerunner of Trich and widely used as a cleaning fluid in radio workshops.
Years of breathing lead based solder fumes, it was years before forced ventilation soldering stations were introduced.
With solder I think the primary concern (from the point of view of working with it) was the fumes given off by the flux, not the lead content. Obviously from a disposal / hygiene point of view the lead is still a problem. The worst of all was lead solder paste, as that had the lead in an easily ingested form. Lead free solder still has the flux, and that's still a problem.
Lead solder is still in use for high reliability in nasty environment applications. Lead-free solder is generally reckoned to be more fragile. It's certainly harder to get a lead free soldering process to be reliable.
It's slightly tricky to balance: lots of scrapped electronics due to failed lead-free soldering processes, or less scrap because of the use of lead solder? There's plenty of other nasties in electronics that makes needless scrapping pretty undesirable. The commercial world has largely got on top of lead free soldering processes now, so I think the argument in that space is firmly on the side of lead free.