By ISAAC WOLF, Scripps Howard News Service

It was the fall of 2007, and the steel mesh that had just arrived from China was radioactive. No one knew it.
Pall Aeropower Corp., a Fort Myers, Fla., parts manufacturer, had ordered the 20,000 pounds of metal to use to make hydraulic filters for airplanes. Unknown to the company, the mesh had been tainted with Cobalt-60, a radioactive material dangerous in high doses.

An Indiana manufacturer unknowingly used metal blended with a dangerous radioactive isotope to make parts for 1,000 La-Z-Boy recliners more than a decade ago.

The U.S. government's only effort to hunt down castoff radioactive waste has recovered just 4 percent of the estimated 500,000 X-ray machines, industrial sensors and other items discarded across the country.
In the past decade, the U.S. Department of Energy's Off-Site Source Recovery Project in New Mexico has retrieved 21,000 items, said project manager Julia Whitworth.

Decades of lax screening, haphazard oversight and few rules in the United States and abroad have allowed low-level radioactive materials to slip into the recycled-metal pipeline and, from there, into ordinary goods.
As a result, consumers, manufacturers, the metal industry, the environment and public health are bearing a growing cost.
Here are some possible solutions:

When a metal recycler north of Memphis, Tenn., inadvertently mixed radioactive material into a new batch of metal in 1997, employees at the facility didn't know about it for three days, state documents show.

For more than a month in the summer of 2006, a metal recycler in Longview, Texas, produced half a million pounds of radioactive material, state and federal documents show.

A quarter-century after two Mexican foundries produced thousands of pounds of radioactive metal, the contaminated material continued to cross the U.S. border and reach California.

Who is in charge of protecting Americans from products made from radioactively tainted metal?
The answer: No one.

Thousands of everyday products and materials containing radioactive metals are surfacing across the United States and around the world.

In the late 1980s, the population of Port St. Lucie, a sleepy Florida city, was exploding. And so was its crime rate.
For the city's police chief at the time, Gil Kerlikowske, the issue was clear: How to strike the right balance between combating the climbing crime rate with the limited resources of a public agency.