Today numsi joined forces with the good people at the Handmade Toy Alliance by becoming members to help protect people making handmade toys and products for children from going out of business. As a parent of two children under four, I know that the safety of our children is of paramount concern. No one wants their children to be anywhere near lead, let alone playing with toys painted with it. However, I believe that the new regulations and requirements of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), whilst well-intentioned, are sweepingly over-reaching and in ill-conceived.

From the Handmade Toy Alliance’s website:

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 toymakers 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.

The consequences of this law are enormous- imagine all the small businesses out there whose creativity and innovation will be suffocated under the burden of testing and labelling. Imagine who will be able to survive the demands of testing- the huge corporations who mass produce items will not be enormously affected by this ruling. A $400 test on a run of thousands of t-shirts is maybe not such a big deal. A $400 test for a one-off or a limited edition handmade garment? A big deal- a very big deal. Already our local stores selling handmade children’s items no longer stock some of the most wonderful wooden toys made in Europe. The manufacturers adhere to the more stringent safety standards found in Europe, and yet they are withdrawing from the US market in droves. This is a loss for everyone.

Here at numsi all of our products are made from safe, tested materials known to contain no lead or pthalates. We would never make anything that was in any way harmful to us or our children. Although I am collecting the certficates of compliance from each of my individual sources, the CPSIA will dictate that each and every numsi product variant (each colour, each design) will have to be tested by a third party lab and labelled accordingly in order to comply with the law. Currently, there is no amendment that states that the burden of testing be placed on the manufacturers of the raw components rather than the assembler of the components- we need change to allow combining tested items together without the requirement to retest. Too many businesses will not be able to continue producing goods without investing tens of thousands of dollars into third-party testing and labeling, just to prove that things that never had a single toxic chemical in them still don’t have a single toxic chemical in them.

Unless there are substantial changes to the law, at a minimum it looks like numsi will no longer be able to produce safe, stylish, chemical free clothing for our kids.

What can you do?

  • Click on the button below for a wealth of resources and ways to help from the awesome ladies behind Cool Mom Picks

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