AFAIK soldering is not hot enough to vaporize lead.
AFAIK soldering is not hot enough to vaporize lead.
The problem isn't vaporizing, or the first consumers direct exposure. The problem is taking a pound of lead and distrubuting it all over the environment in the form of spatter, shavings, assembled pcbs, connections, etc. Probably less than half of the solder winds up in a product or project, and that is just a short delay on it's trip to the envirnment when the project is discarded. 100% of it ends there, and not in a nice solid lump but practically aresolized.
It's the same as just taking that same pound of lead and directly grinding it into a fine powder and just sprinkling it everywhere, where it becomes part of the soil more or less and leeches into everything and can't be removed.
And 100,000 or a million or many millions of other people all doing the same thing, every day, for generations. Yess millions. There are 300million just in the US alone, and there are more than one person in every 300 that solders at least some times.
If your iron can hold it's temperature worth a darn, the lead-free solder is fine. If it can't, you're going to struggle no matter what you use.
Pure tin (or Sn99.3Cu0.7 alloy) is garbage, the silver helps a bunch.
For demanding applications there's apparently some even more performant alloys available today, eg. Innolot [1].
Because if that, many people consider the ban of industrial lead solder to be over-zealous. But that ban is in place to stop consumers being contaminated if they somehow touch the board. Also to minimise lead entering the water table once it is discarded.