My girlfriend's x-mas gift came with a cancer warning. Any reason for concern?

It means that when the laptop dies, instead of throwing it in the garbage, where it will end up in a landfill, get rained on, and leach harmful chemicals into the soil and eventually your drinking water, take it to an appropriate disposal site, so that the materials within can be handled and disposed of safely. As long as you use the laptop as a laptop, you will be just fine.

And, you know… don’t take it apart and eat the contents. That would be bad.

California Prop 65 labels are all over the place, but one never knows how much of the chemical is present and in what form or how it will be transferred. So don’t use it as a plate, and don’t wash your face with it, and your girlfriend will be fine.

Yeah, don’t eat it and you’ll be perfectly safe. And probably, if you did eat it, you’d have a bigger risk of choking then any other hazard.

Slightly less sarcastic, it almost certainly contains some form of plastic or other polymer, and thus at some point a toxic chemical was used in it’s creation and/or the polymer itself may be considered ‘toxic’, based on a variety of highly unlike scenarios (i.e. injection). According to California, this means it’s a cancer risk. According to everywhere else in the world, it’s not.

Also, California apparently picks and chooses which from the IARC list it decides to label as carcinogenic, especially from group 3, which are defined as ‘unknown’. Chances are very good that that label means absolutely nothing.

And people wonder why professionals were opposed to prop 37.

Well… these labels are not entirely a joke. Leaching from electronic waste is a legitimate concern. But not until it’s time to get rid of it.

@glacial This is about a laptop bag, not a laptop itself.

@glacial while I don’t disagree have you seen supposedly “safe” dumping sites? Or the places that melt down the parts for expensive pieces?

@zenvelo Whoa. I did not notice that! Thank you.

An enviormental club at my school just gave away bags that had this label on it. I found it hilariously ironic.

You can’t have both of those labels together like that, you either have one saying the product causes caner, or you have one saying it complies with state regulations.

I would research what chemical is in it, and at what levels, to see how much risk there is. If there is enough risk, get rid of it.

@poisonedantidote You can sell it even though it comes under the Prop 65 label, because Prop 65 only says you have to label it (and because most things that fall under Prop 65 are completely harmless, but I digress). You can, and people often do, sell things that are technically toxic but not actually dangerous.

I personally think use of the “Prop 65” labels is overdone, although still required. As @BhacSsylan says above, it’s probably technically toxic, but in a practical sense not actually dangerous.