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.
