Wednesday, January 21, 2009

To Us, With Love

I don't know how many people are aware of this or how many more will know b/c of my blog. But there is legislation being put forth by the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA for short).

What it is, in short, is that all toys must go through testing to see how dangerous a toy is for children to play with. Granted, it is good to have standards for toys, (like all the cases/issues we've heard about the toys from China that were causing problems for kids (and I'm sure their parents) - dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick)

Here is an article from Handmade Toy Alliance (found here) about it:

Help Save Handmade Toys in the USA from the CPSIA

Who Are We?

We are not some pretend group sponsored by big companies trying to appear grassroots. We are an alliance of toy stores, toy makers and children's product manufacturers from across the country who want to preserve unique handmade toys, clothes, and all manner of children's goods in the USA.

See our faces on facebook.

The issue:
In 2007,
large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public's trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.


For small toy makers and manufacturers of children's products, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.

  • A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $300 - $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
  • A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes cloth diapers to sell online must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
  • A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
  • And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.




The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of children's goods that have earned and kept the public's trust: Toys, clothes, and accessories made by small businesses where the owners are personally involved in the creation of their goods. The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade children's products will no longer be legal in the US.

If this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.

How You can Help:

Please write to your United States Congress Person and Senator to request changes in the CPSIA to save handmade toys and children's products. Use our sample letter or write your own. You can find your Congress Person here and Senator here.

There is also an excellent blog about this on Mama Is.

Please help! I am sending my representatives a letter as soon as I post this.

2 comments:

Turtle said...

I think they have written this law up to be so strict to cover their **** oops, i mean butts that they are going to take the handmade industry down, it is pitiful! the more i hear about it the more it upsets me. i can understand large coorperations who appear to have been the main problem to begin with but the small home based companies.... where is the logic! folks can peek at most and see if they will be safe or not, ridiculous.

Nandi said...

Right! It agitates me too! I can understand the part of wanting to have safe toys for children to play with, but at what cost? It's another blanketing law that I feel should be more specific about what it targets.