What do the following items for children 12 & under have in common: clothes with zippers, snaps & buttons, mini-scooters & ATVs, books published before 1985, toys, ball point pens, barrettes with bows, the list goes on and on: they all became “hazardous waste” on February 10th, 2009, six months after President Bush signed the Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act into law.
I think everyone probably remembers the recalls of the Chinese toys back in 2007 for excess lead in the paint. The CPSIA was intended to limit the amount of lead to 600 ppm (to go down to 300 ppm in August), but in doing so they really overreacted. The law requires manufacturers to test the completed item for lead & phthalates to prove that it meets the limits even if the components going into the item have already been tested. Right now, the testing for lead can be accomplished by using an XRF gun, but starting in August, 3rd party testing will be required that will destroy the item being tested. As of February 10th, products for children without a certificate of compliance can not be legally sold or donated.
Ok, who is a manufacturer? One would think of large companies like Mattel, Hasbro and other large companies who produce runs of thousands of the same item and therefore testing becomes an incidental expense as only one item needs to be tested. After all, the toys that were recalled were imported by the big companies. But the CPSC’s definition of a manufacturer also includes
“Anyone who makes, produces or assembles a product is
considered to be a manufacturer. If what you make is sold or
donated, something as simple as adding ribbons to hair clips,
knitting hats, or stringing beads into necklaces makes you a
manufacturer.”
This definition catches the home crafters who make One Of A Kind items that sell on Ebay, Etsy, the local craft show and even those who donate to charities. Testing is not cheap, especially when it must be done on the completed item and every component tested. For a while, crafters on Etsy were pricing items including the cost of testing which made a little girl’s patchwork skirt several thousand dollars. Many home crafters have given up and gone out of business rather than risk the high fines.
Large companies are feeling the pinch too.
(A chart of the economic impact.) Thrift stores are discarding children’s clothes with snaps, buttons or zippers because it is not economically feasible to test them. Books printed before 1985 are being sent to land fills. By making the law retroactive, companies were left with items they can not legally sell and those who owned stock in the companies such as Gymboree saw the value of the stock fall even faster than the current stock market downturn.
The way the law is written, it is extremely difficult for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to make exemptions. Congress was warned by CPSC staff that the law was too complex, too overreaching and implemented in too much of a hurry for reasonable regulations to be written. Appeals have been made to the Committee on Energy and Commerce which Rep. Henry Waxman chairs, but Waxman appears to only be interested in getting Nancy Nord, acting chairman of the CPSC who warned against the unintended consequences of the law, replaced and will not hold hearings until there is a new chairman. In the meantime, while the CPSC has said that it won’t enforce the law until next year, the way is still clear for state attorney generals to pursue charges and those in several states have stated that they will do so. There’s also “SOS” or Safe Online Shopping – an internet surveillance operation of the CPSC. While some progress has been made in exempting some materials such as fabric & yarn from the list of what needs to be tested, the overreach of the law is still causing hardship by driving small companies out of business or limiting the resources of low cost (think Salvation Army, Goodwill, local thrift shops) clothing for children during a far reaching recession.
I know that I haven’t touched on many of the problems that are being caused by this law such as libraries & thrift store discarding children’s books, but more information can be found at
CPSIA-Central
Overlawyered
The CSPC latest guide line from March 3rd which may or may not be the last word according to the disclaimer on the first page.
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