When parents, relatives, or friends purchase a toy for child, they should feel confident that the toy’s safety was checked before it reached the store shelf.
This summer alone there have been three recalls of millions of imported toys with impermissible levels of lead in their paint and other serious safety hazards.
The recalls involved popular items like Sesame Street characters, Thomas the Tank Engine trains, and Dora the Explorer figures. Earlier recalls have targeted millions of pieces of children’s metal jewelry with too much lead. These recalls are of great concern to parents throughout the nation, including the parents of 67,000 children under the age of five who live in Maine.
These safety recalls are troubling. Children who ingest lead – whether from toys, old paint, or contaminated soil or house dust – can suffer from impaired brain development, nerve damage, and other health consequences. That is why we have regulations for toys that limit lead exposure, just as we set standards and rules for toy parts that could cause injury to children.
The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission oversees the safety of more than 15,000 types of consumer products and has announced thousands of recalls since it began operations in 1973. But the Commission has only about 400 employees to carry out its tasks, and its budget has not kept pace with its important responsibilities.
The recent recalls of consumer products raise a number of questions: Does the Consumer Product Safety Commission have the resources it needs to carry out its mission and to help ensure that unsafe products do not end up in the hands of consumers? Should there be better coordination between industry and the government to ensure the safety of products? And what else should be done to address this serious issue?
Congress must determine how and how often hazards are entering the market; whether easily detectable dangers are finding their way onto store shelves; and whether the Commission has the authority and the resources it needs to give adequate protection to America’s children.
These are critical questions. That is why I have directed my staff on the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs – the Senate’s primary investigating committee -- to examine these questions.
Committee investigators are interviewing staff of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, representatives of consumer-advocacy groups, and the toy industry to get a clearer picture of the issues and to lay the foundation for administrative or legislative reforms.
American consumer-safety practice has been to rely on industry self-reporting and voluntary recalls coordinated with the CPSC. It is, after all, in a manufacturer’s own interest to avoid the bad publicity and lawsuits that would be invited by not acting on discovery of product hazards. But products like toys and children’s clothing present some special difficulties.
For one thing, they are overwhelmingly imported. China alone accounts for 80 percent of the toys sold in this country. The common use of multiple subcontractors and raw-material vendors in foreign operations can make it difficult for manufacturers to be sure of what they’re getting. Nevertheless, the American importers and retailers who offer products to the public share responsibility for protecting children.
The recall approach to safety has some built-in problems, starting with the difficulty of reaching all the families who have a recalled toy in their homes. But even if we could reach everyone, there’s another challenge. A survey released earlier this month found that more than 75 percent of parents couldn’t remember the name of a single company that had issued a toy recall. Further, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Mattel Corporation, the nation’s largest toymaker, spent months handling complaints and collecting information in three major cases before reporting problems to the CPSC, even though the legal requirement for reporting problems is “immediate” notification.
Reality may be sinking in. The Toy Industry Association, whose 500-plus members account for 85 percent of U.S. toy sales, has now called for mandatory standards for safety testing of toys, including establishing standards for testing labs, designating hazards to be checked, identifying points in the production process for testing, and determining the frequency of testing.
Whenever an importer, licensee, or retailer puts a product destined for children’s use on the market, they have an enormous obligation to ensure that reasonable steps have been taken to anticipate and avoid safety hazards to our youngest consumers. If competitive markets and business self-interest can’t reliably give us that result, then we must be sure that our laws provide the necessary incentives to ensure that toys and other products reaching American consumers are as safe as possible.
As our investigation proceeds, I’ll be looking hard at our current system for safeguarding children and will move swiftly to seek needed improvements.
Meanwhile, I urge parents to examine their small children’s toys and other goods closely, and to consult the safety information posted on-line at the CPSC, www.cpsc.gov/index.html, and at the Consumer Reports safety weblog, http://blogs.consumerreports.org/safety/.
Let’s all work together to keep our kids safe.