This page describes who maintains Heavy Metal Index, how the index is governed, and the firewall between the index and the Paleo Foundation’s Heavy Metal Tested & Certified (HMT&C) certification program. It is one of two pages a sophisticated reader is expected to consult before relying on the index for regulatory, legal, or commercial purposes; the other is methodology.
This page is a stub and will be expanded. The governance posture below is not aspirational; it is the working policy under which the index is being built. Sections marked stub will be expanded with names, dates, and procedural detail before the index transitions out of preview.
Operator
Heavy Metal Index is operated by the Paleo Foundation, a non-profit entity registered in Cyprus. The Foundation also operates the Heavy Metal Tested & Certified (HMT&C) program at heavymetaltested.com, which is a separately branded certification program for consumer products tested against thresholds for lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and related elements.
The Foundation’s operation of both projects is disclosed openly on every page of this index, in the site header, and is the central governance question this page exists to address. The remainder of this document describes how the two projects are kept editorially distinct.
Editorial firewall
The wiki and HMT&C operate in different epistemic registers, by design.
The wiki reports what the peer-reviewed and regulatory literature supports. It does not advocate, market, harmonize with HMT&C thresholds, or soften claims to make HMT&C look stronger. HMT&C sets certification thresholds that may be tighter than the literature floor for precautionary, market-ratcheting, feasibility-driven, or regulatory-alignment reasons. When HMT&C thresholds differ from the literature baseline, the rationale is named in HMT&C documentation; the gap is not hidden.
The firewall is enforced in three concrete ways.
First, one-way linking. HMT&C documentation may cite wiki entries as the literature baseline for its threshold rationale. Wiki entries do not endorse, mention, or rank HMT&C-certified brands, do not link to the HMT&C program from page bodies, and do not present certification status as evidence of safety.
Second, architectural separation. The wiki lives at heavymetalindex.com. The certification program lives at heavymetaltested.com. The two sites are operated separately and treated as independent properties for legal and editorial purposes. Cross-linking between the two domains exists at the navigational level only.
Third, no brand-level data. Brand-specific lab results, certificates of analysis, and internal test data do not appear in this index. Where third-party testing has produced brand-by-brand contamination data (Consumer Reports, Healthy Babies Bright Futures, and similar), this index summarizes the category-level and ingredient-level signal and links to the source for brand-specific values. Brand-by-brand tables are not reproduced.
Fourth, evidence-state separation. HMT&C thresholds, internal standards candidates, and app-model assumptions are separate claim classes. They may not support public Heavy Metal Index claims. A public claim must trace to literature, regulatory, toxicology, exposure, or occurrence evidence approved for public use.
Fifth, two-stage review. Machine-extracted records can enter internal evidence registers and draft queues, but public pages require approved_for_public values or claims before newly extracted numeric claims are generated into public prose. Internal standards work may use approved_for_internal records, but that approval does not authorize public wiki publication.
Sixth, data gaps stay visible. When the Index has no approved evidence for a metal/product/matrix cell, the correct public state is “Data gap.” The wiki must not imply that missing evidence means a product type is probably clean or low risk.
Curators
[Stub. To be expanded with named curators, qualifications, editorial roles, and the sign-off process for substantive entries.]
Conflict of interest posture
[Stub. To be expanded with the Foundation’s policy on disclosing financial relationships, the procedure for handling entries where a curator has a potential conflict, and the recusal practice for HMT&C-related decisions.]
Errors and corrections
[Stub. To be expanded with: how to flag a suspected error (contact channel, submission format), how corrections are tracked (changelog convention, public record of changes), the version-history mechanism, and the timeline within which substantiated errors are corrected.]
Disputes
[Stub. To be expanded with the procedure for handling substantive disagreements with index claims, including who reviews disputes, how the review is documented, and whether contested entries carry visible flags during review.]
Governing reference
The internal governance document for this index is maintained at the project root as CLAUDE.md. The policies described on this page are the public restatement of that document; in any conflict between this page and the internal document, the internal document is authoritative and this page will be updated to match.