Psychotomy

Last year, around this time actually I s’pose, was all the recalls and etc about toys made with high levels of lead. magic sand that turned into ghp when ingested. yadda yadda yadda. The CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) was getting railed on because they weren’t catching most of these things, rather either the companies were or someone was getting ill or dieing and the resultant investigation was finding WOAH! This kids toy turns out is TOXIC!

Part of the problem was that the CPSC had like 1 or 2 people testing kids toys. Which meant they didn’t even vaguely get to everything. That started coming to light later, and is more of an excuse than a defense. But I can see their problem, if they don’t get the funding they don’t get the funding and they have to cut corners somewhere. So blame needs to pass up the chain to whoever can provide the funding.

Then apparently Congress decided to get into the act. Because, THE CHILDREN! OMG! The horrors! I can DO something about this! What should we do? Raise penalty fines? Increase CPSC funding? do like we did for the securities and mortgage companies, slap someone on the wrist, give them money to fix their problems, and make them promise to never never EVER do it again? Write new legislation that throws the biggest net we can find, requiring tests and independent certification? no, that would be ridiculous. who would pay for all that new testing?

Oh, we could make the companies pay for it! that way we don’t have to come up with any more money! EXCELLENT! If you know children, your products must be TESTED by INDEPENDENT LABS who will charge (reasonable? too harsh?) money! We don’t want to get into the business of regulating money, though, so we’ll let them decide what to charge. We’re sure they wouldn’t use a government mandate and complex (but not rigorous) certification procedures as an open license to commit robbery.

Bitter much? Yeah :o So the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) outlines various things that cannot be in products that kids can “reasonably put in their mouth.” Of course, if you have a toddler, you understand that kids can “reasonably” put the freakin’ refrigerator in their mouth, yaknow? But congress critters, they don’t have time to raise their own kids. The ones who bring them to DC with them put them in expensive private or even boarding schools, because lets face it. Mommy and Daddy are on capitol hill at all hours doing important work. The ones who’s families stay in Des Moines, well, obviously we’re not going to be seeing them every night.

The legislation is a big long document full of legislative branch legal jargon. So a lot of what I know is from the summaries I’ve seen elsewhere. Which, admittedly, are frequently on the handmade toy sites, etsy, and what kiir reads me from her cloth diaper and waldorf boards. But, generally, what I’ve gotten is the following:

1. Companies must have their products tested, by third party independent certified labs, and documented as being lead, pthalate, and whatever else, free.
2. The third party labs are charging on the order of 4000$US for such tests
3. EACH toy or item must be tested. I imagine the toy kitchen can be sent as a single test and get the toy utensils it comes with. But if you sell the kitchen in green and red, that might be two tests. If you sell two kitchens (say one has an icebox, the other doesn’t), that IS two tests.
4. You have to have certified resources used to manufacture, and you must be able to prove the trail. I’m not sure about this part, though, since it seems like it would be alternative to actual testing, assuming you could talk your suppliers into it of course. And why they’d care, I have no idea.

Thats what I’ve identified so far. What does this mean? Well, if you’re Hasbro, not much. Seriously, you sell 5000 bimbo beach cars this xmas season. That’s 1$ apiece on the price for the CPSIA lab test. Which you’ll just tack onto the MSRP as 2$ and BAM! you just made a profit off the testing!

But if you’re one of the etsy shops we like to buy handmade wood toys for DK from? Say, the shop we’ve bought two caterpillars, two car carriers, three cars, and a tow truck from? Those were ~30$ a pop I think. But, at best, that would be 16k in testing. Sure he sells a bunch of those items. But, hand carved by one guy? I think he sells maybe a dozen of each in a year? Lets say 2-dozen. That only raises the price from 30$ to 110$. oh, wait, at 110$ I wouldn’t have bought so much. So 150$. Well, now I might not have bought anything. Because DK doesn’t need 150$ toys!

Then things get funky weird. DK’s cloth diapers? Well, he CAN put them in his mouth .. BAM! 4000$ for testing! And I’m guessing that bamboo/velour/un-lined, snaps/velcro, died/undied would count as separate. And to be fair, we’ve gotten everything but velcro from his “normal” place at this point. That is, minimum 3 types. But combinatoric would probably be in play. Which means 3x2x2 … 12 options. 50k she’d spend on testing. ASSUMING that she could test each type once and be done with it. The diapers are, currently, 5-10$ apiece IIRC. We’ve bought 3-dozen, getting a fourth done smaller for baby girl now. I think she sells two slots a month, and old customers can always get in. So say she does 100 diapers a month. Thats 1200 in the year. Which, if the certification was annual, would add 40$ to each diaper (I think I did that math right). Sure, if it’s a permanent cert (assuming she doesn’t change dye or anything) (I would imagine that lots would need to be checked, since a new dye might have … but leaving that off) she could add a buck to each diaper and get her money back in … 40 years? 5 bucks and 8 years. Of course, in the meantime, she had to pop that 50k from somewhere and she doesn’t have huge pockets of cash like, say, Mattel. She might notice the extra 50k on her mortgage …

One thing that apparently got missed in the panic mode is that virtually all (all maybe?) of the issues came from the multinationals that outsourced their production to China for just pennies a day … The plants in the US weren’t producing these things. The European sources already have as strict, or stricter, requirements in place. The handmade craft places are, well, doing it by hand and probably not mixing the GHP and Arsenic with their Yellow #7.

Actually, at least one European company is pulling out of the US market because the extra fee for testing, they’re just not interested in it since they can already satisfy the stricter EU regs, they’re confident that they ALSO don’t have higher amounts to trigger these tests. But there’s no provision for that. No reciprocity.

OK, some links here:

• Full Text (I think the ENR one, #6 at the time of this post, is the final passed wording)
• CPSC Summary of the CPSIA
• Handmade Toy Alliance website with a form letter you can send your congress critters.
• CPSIA, Selecta, and other Companies article from the Washington Post

Posted in: general by attriel / Tags: CPSIA