The U.S. Congress very rightly pointed out the safety hazards of toys being imported especially from China. And in the same vein, the Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in 2008. Two main clauses of this act were about banning the lead and phthalates in toys and secondly it mandated a third-party testing and certification for all toys. Thirdly it also make it requirement for toy makers to label each toy with a date and batch number. As far as overall spirit of this CPSIA is very much correct and much needed but it simply ignores very important variation in toys making industry.
These new changes are far simpler for those manufacturers who are working on a very large scale to simply modify or add few steps in their toy production process. Also adding these simple steps like labeling or adding batch number for them is not a big problem because of their large production and cost for such action is minimal if we talk of thousand toy production in a day. But what about those toymakers who are working at very small level but producing the state-of-art toys which are proven to be completely safe for children. Here CPSIA completely ignore this fact and demand for every toy producer to follow the act in totality. Now let us talk about the testing cost if it is done by any third-party as mentioned in CPSIA. It is estimated that fee for such testing could reach about $300-$400 fee per toy in order to sell any toy.
Now you can very imagine how deeply flawed this CPSIA is when we consider those toymakers who make say 100 toys a month. The truth of matter is that most of toys which are being manufactured in United States and Europe are safe and carry no such problems. The problem is with the toys that are being bombarded to our markets from country like China. Despite addressing this problem, CPSIA quite ignorantly put small toy makers into deep hole for nothing. This is high time for re-evaluation of CPSIA in the light of true facts to save large number of people involved in micro-business. It is well known that wood, cotton, paper and other such natural material do not contain lead or any other toxic material at all, so why to include these into same testing process as plastic or other such materials. Also labeling and adding batch number does not by any means apply to small toy businessmen and this should uniquely apply to those producers making toys in large numbers. Such amendments will surely provide relief to small businessmen in toy industry who are already facing the huge challenges for survival in the market.
Tags: lead-free toys, toys and law
[...] about hazards of toys containing lead to the health of children, the American Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in 2008 in which along with other mandatory practices for manufactures of toys it was said [...]