Screening toys for lead postponed
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
A new federal law requires that all children's products be screened for lead by next week. But the federal commission in charge gave companies an extra year to get it done.
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Transcript:
After congress passed the poison screening requirement last year, companies and organizations began seeking exemptions. Among them, libraries, book publishers, and clothing manufacturers. Sandy Horrocks is spokesperson for the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Horrocks: We are absolutely certain and have studies that show that books do not pose any of the health risks to children that the law intended to address.
The swarm of appeals caused the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to postpone the deadline a year. Congressman Joe Sestak co-sponsored the bill. He agrees that many of these suppliers should be excluded, but that Commission's blanket exemptions went too far.
Sestak: They should work very quickly and hard to find which of these exemptions should not prevail for that period of time.
Small businesses have expressed concern about the financial impact of screening. Sestak says that won't be a valid exemption.
Screening “toys” understates the issue. This law covers absolutely everything for use by children under 12. It’s designed to force manufacturers and retailers, many of whom are our friends and neighbors, to repeatedly prove their innocence, in spite of the fact that there’s no reason to think them guilty.
For a Mom and Pop printing shop, probably owned by a perfectly nice couple trying to feed their children, testing and tagging on an average 50-unit order will far exceed the total profit on the job. Never mind that there's not a single recorded “death by t-shirt poisoning”.
For home crafters and small online retailers using their projects to buy groceries for their families it will mean the end of that source of income. Never mind that cases of “death by handmade Easter dress” are, well, virtually unheard of.
For employees of larger companies already living in fear of unemployment jobs or wages will be lost. The ultimate in safety doesn’t come free, whatever our disconnected politicians think.
Ironically, particularly for families with young children, the CPSIA will mean fewer choices and far costlier goods, with virtually no measurable benefit to their real lives.
Apparently Mr. Sestak finds it more distressing that the occasional theoretical child may have an encounter with heavy metals than that the real children of ordinary families will suffer grave hardship from his ill-considered actions.