Oddly, NASA and the aerospace industry ban pure tin because of tin whiskers, and RoHS has exemptions carved out for high-reliability components.

Remember the NASA investigation into the Toyota unintended acceleration problems? The NHTSA reported, “In one case, NHTSA obtained the pedal and tested it, finding a resistive short in the pedal position sensor. NASA subsequently examined the pedal, confirmed the existence of the short, and found a “tin whisker” to be the cause of the resistive short.” So RoHS hasn’t been as event-free as advertised. Tin whiskers take a while to grow, so banning them one year and declaring victory the following because nobody has report a problem with their throw-away consumer electronics is not without its problems.

Today it is difficult to purchase a consumer electronics product that isn’t compliant. Apple, Dell, Sony, Motorola, HP, Cannon, Epson, Sharp and numerous others have been making millions of RoHS products for years now without reliability issues.

Tin whiskers is a well known, researched issue that has largely been mitigated by new solder alloys like tin-silver-copper. To date there are no significant known documented failures of RoHS compliant products due to tin whiskers.

Here’s a great link:

http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/benchmarks-best-practices/rohs-environment/rohs-one-year-later-the-good-news-is-the-bad-news-was-wrong

Luckily CRTs are obsolete with the advent of LCD technology, so I don’t see this as an issue long term.

As for plumbing solder, it has been lead-free for years.

That would cause the dolls to cost well over (many times over) what I would charge for them, and would place them outside the reach of most people for a child’s cloth doll.

I think that artisans have simply been forgotten in the process of writing the law.