Last week, the CPSC announced the recall of a children's book published by St. Martin's Press that included a piece of vinyl that contained dangerous levels of lead. While the recall was the first in what will likely be a long list of novelty children's books coming under CPSC scrutiny for their incorporation of sketchy plastics, what really caught our eye about it was a note in the recall notice that indicated that the CPSC had been alerted to the product's lead levels by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG). Digging deeper, we discovered that US PIRG had reported their findings in a report published on November 24, 2009 - a full month and a half before the recall was announced.

Meanwhile, Target is continuing to "investigate" the Green Baby onesie ZRecs, in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Health, identified in November as containing nearly four times the legal limit of lead in its tagless label - putting it in direct contact with a baby's skin. The California Attorney General notified Target of the finding and Target stopped selling it while promising to investigate the matter themselves. (The Washington Post, in an otherwise excellent article on "citizen regulators," erroneously stated that Target had recalled the onesie. The Post ran a correction this week.) Target representative Beth Hanson confirmed in an email to us a week ago:

• Upon receiving the information from the California Attorney General's office about this product, Target issued a voluntary market withdrawal. This product has been removed from sale in our stores and we continue to investigate the issue.


• Once a market withdrawal has been issued, we hard lock all items at the point of sale. A “hard lock” means that should a guest attempt to purchase a withdrawn product while we are in the process of removing it from the sales floor, the product will flag our cashiers with a “do not sell” message at the register.


• It is important for all of our guests to know that Target is committed to providing high quality and safe products. We realize that product safety is top of mind for our guests. We continue to partner with our vendors to ensure that the best products are in our stores and online at Target.com.


• Since this is an ongoing investigation about this particular product, we are unable to provide further specifics.


• Guests who have purchased the withdrawn product can return it to any Target store for a full refund.

We inquired further regarding the timeline such an investigation might take, and Hanson declined to provide any estimate or any additional information about Target's review process. But it's hard, on its face, to accept that it should take this long for an issue like this to be resolved. The longer a company like Target waits, the greater the distance between purchase and notification, the greater the exposure children face, and the fewer returns the company is likely to get when the product is ultimately (presumably) recalled. The disincentives to conduct a timely recall are real and obvious.

The CPSC is also looking into this case and we are confident it will be resolved eventually. But how long can a company like Target make consumers wait before they cast even greater doubt on the commitment to safety the company claims to set as such a high priority?

More on onesie hazards to come.

ZRecs_Safety is a frightening-looking Twitter user who offers links, commentary, and insights on the state of child safety in the U.S. Our goal in providing this service is to keep parents abreast of the most relevant standouts in a sea of product safety information it would be difficult for anyone to monitor independently, and most of which never gets covered elsewhere. (The avatar is a nod to Magnetix, one of the most flagrantly dangerous toys recalled in the last several years.) In addition to offering an unfiltered and immediate feed of child-related recalls from the CPSC - with direct links to every recall or advisory announcement as they are published by the Commission - we monitor recalls and notices from the Food and Drug Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Canadian and European Union regulatory agencies. We don't publish all of these, and that's what makes this free service so exceptional (if we do say so ourselves).

We alert subscribers and followers to car seat recalls by the NHTSA and child-related FDA recalls and notices in the U.S., but as for the international scene, we canvas these recall notifications and identify products that are either available in the U.S. or represent a hazard found here. Whenever we find a relevant match, we publish the international recall information and point out the U.S. availability or related issue.

We also follow child safety news and tweet out interesting news articles, highlighting great reporting and finds from other blogs. With rare exception, these are items that never make it into full-fledged ZRecs posts. So if you're only getting child safety information from us through Z Recommends, you're only getting half the story!

Here are a few examples of items you could find in the ZRecs_Safety feed, which you can follow on Twitter or subscribe to in your favorite feed reader.

Did you know Canadian authorities have recommended installing certain car seats from Cosco, Safety 1st, and Eddie Bauer the "wrong" way to counteract a defect in the car seat? [Link]



Or that the EU has banned many pacifiers as choking hazards for a requirement that the U.S. either lacks or won't enforce? Never did get a response from the CPSC on that one. [Link]


Or that infant self-feeding devices are banned completely in Canada? Not so in the U.S. [Link]:


We also highlight unusual recalls that might offer guidance to manufacturers, importers, and consumers trying to stay abreast of potentially hazardous types of children's items.


If you'd like us to delve into any ZRecs_Safety topics in post form, let us know and we'll consider it - most ZRecs_Safety tweets are the tip of a good-sized iceberg.

(Here's a link to the tweet shown at the top of this post, where you can click through to either of the linked sources.)

Over the longer term, we'll judge this free service's success, and the wisdom of our time spent on it, by the Twitter followership it has attracted. (We can't track its RSS subscription levels.) So if you're on Twitter and think this sounds like information you'd like to get your hands on, why not follow ZRecs_Safety today?

We contacted the great folks at child safety advocacy group Kids In Danger about the voluntary ban on drop-side cribs that was approved by the industry standards group ASTM in the spring. The nonprofit had a representative on the ASTM committee that made the decision, and we asked KID why a standard couldn't have been developed that made drop-side crib designs safer. According to KID's Nancy A. Cowles, they worked to get approval of a workable standard that would have improved drop-side cribs rather than banning them outright. In response to our query, Cowles wrote:

We believe the UL [Underwriters Laboratories] standard, developed with input from many sources and including rigorous tests, would go far in making cribs on the market - including drop side cribs - safer. UL’s ‘racking’ test would simulate the use a crib gets in real life and be more likely to identify durability issues and hardware failures. However, since publishing the standard, UL has been unable to get any manufacturer to agree to test their cribs using this stringent standard. So we supported the move to require four fixed sides at the last ASTM meeting because without rigorous testing that the manufacturers seem unwilling to undergo, it is the best way to keep babies safe in cribs.

You can return to our previous posts on the drop-side ban to read comments from parents who do or don't see the need for them (so let's not rehash that here!), or to get the full backstory. But I'd like to reprint a bit of what we said there, in light of the very helpful information from the experts at Kids In Danger.

In our March 21 post "The Drop-Side Crib Ban: Is There More Than Meets The Eye?" we wrote:

[T]he proposal of an outright elimination of drop-side cribs from ASTM standards - essentially saying that no drop-side crib design can meet a reputable safety standard - has us scratching our heads. There seem to be some unanswered questions in the dance ASTM and the CPSC are doing on this issue.

Is the problem some inherent flaw in drop side designs generally, as the ASTM's move implies, or cheap drop sides with plastic hardware, as the CPSC's letters suggest?

If the issue is one of quality, what does it say about the members of the ASTM F15.18 committee - which likely includes representatives from every company with an interest in infant cribs, i.e. everyone who makes them - that they would prefer an outright ban on the design than mandated quality improvements?

What sort of benefits might accrue to manufacturers who rely on the low end of the market to ban designs that can only be produced well at a higher cost? In other words, if higher standards for drop sides required more expensive parts and better design, would manufacturers who relied on a high volume of cheap cribs be put at a competitive disadvantage? Could these manufacturers, voting as a bloc, make a tactical decision to eliminate this portion of the market rather than abandon it to their higher-quality competitors?

Case closed.

Investigative Mommy Blogger published their first report this week, and it's a good read on an interesting issue. The report's authors found that for kids between one month and five years of age, shopping carts result in more emergency room visits than strollers, high chairs, cribs, changing tables, walkers and jumpers, baby gates, and bouncy seats combined, or more than 23,000 times in 2007 alone. The question is, why?

We all know not to do this:


Photo by greefus groinks

and we are all well aware that one should never, under any circumstances, be caught doing this:


Photo by Nathan Huth

Certainly many of those 24,000+ injuries can be attributed to kids riding in the basket, jumping out, hanging on the side or front, and otherwise bringing those "do not" signs to life as a harried parent tries to get through the store without a tantrum. But "many" is a fuzzy statement. How many?

IMB focuses on the role of safety belts in this issue, and rightly so. Kids who are strapped in find it very difficult to fall out of shopping carts, try as they might. Their blogging team sent fourteen bloggers visited a total of 30 stores to check shopping carts and found that a total of one third of them had broken or missing safety belts. This is pretty poor performance considering the various rules that mandate scheduled upkeep and outline other retailer responsibilities.

Then again, if you're a parent who shops with a young child, I'd be surprised if this number seemed high to you. I bet you could quickly compile a list in your mind of which stores you visit that have a high number of broken straps.

But while most parents will reject a gunky cart because they don't want that gunk going in the kiddo's mouth, many shrug off a broken safety belt because there's a false sense of security. You're three inches from the child's seat when you're making that snap decision, and it's easy to forget how frequently we may take a step or two away from the cart, for several mentally involved seconds at a time, while we pore over ingredient labels or competing deals.

If your interest lies simply in knowing how to help your child survive the dangers of shopping carts, we can sum it up quite simply:

• Make your child sit in the child seat. No exceptions.


• Only use a shopping cart with a working safety belt.


• Don't leave the cart to get something - take the cart with you.


• Don't lean on the cart handle.

There! You didn't need us for that, did you? You already knew it, and that 24,000+ figure is a helpful memory-booster.

But what if thousands of kids properly buckled in their shopping cart seats are still heading to the ER?

Investigative Mommy Blogger's excellent report, in addition to demonstrating a cooperative model for semi-professional consumer research and advocacy, offers plenty of data for the rest of us to chew on.

Which brings me to the small but very flavorful bite I'd like to take out of this issue: A significant percentage of these injuries, if the AAP interpretation is sound, don't have much to do with safety belts.

Stroller Shopping cart physics

Parsing out the causes of shopping cart accidents is difficult because the numbers - both those IMB cites from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and those in the American Academy of Pediatrics 2005 survey that IMB cites, which we looked at - leave some questions unanswered. The AAP says that 38% of injuries to kids age two and under (using 2005 numbers) were associated with cart tip-overs, which are often contributed to by the child's vertical position and where their center of gravity falls. Regular readers will remember Adrienne's recent discussion of stroller physics; it's time to put that knowledge to use. Read what the AAP has to say about shopping cart design:

Shopping carts vary significantly in design characteristics including height, weight, center of gravity, and wheelbase dimensions. Some carts have a relatively narrow wheelbase in relation to their height, which makes them more likely to tip over [sideways]. An important variable affecting rearward tip-over potential is the location of the handle and child seating area in relation to the rear axle. If a vertical line is dropped from the handle, the horizontal distance between that line and the rear axle can vary significantly. The greater this horizontal distance, the more likely downward pressure on the handle will cause the cart to tip over backward. A vertical force as little as 16 lb applied downward on the handle is all that is required to tip some carts over An average adult can apply this amount of force without difficulty with forearms resting on the top of the cart handle. In addition, if the child seating area is located farther rearward in relation to the rear axle of the cart, or if the child in the seating area leans toward the rear of the cart, the cart will more easily tip over backward.

You can download the five-page technical report, "Shopping Cart-Related Injuries to Children," in PDF format.

Now, let's work those armchair engineering degrees to work, shall we? For this exercise, we'll focus on "rearward tipping."

This is what most of us would consider a typical shopping cart, with a deep wedge that serves as a leg-dangling area for a child and a rear axle that thrusts back out to place the child's center of gravity under the cart rather than behind it:


Photo by Kasia/flickr.


Photo by Rick Harris.

But not all carts are like that, right? We'll start off with the simplest counterexample.

When viewing the below photograph, please keep in mind that we quite consciously avoid using publicly-shared photographs as examples of bad behavior. (This makes it very hard to find graphics to use in our car seat reporting, because most children in or being placed in car seats on Flickr - from infants through booster seat users - are not using them properly, for one reason or another. Ninety percent, easy.) So I am not employing the below photo to condemn parents who let their children sit in shopping carts eating hot dogs.


Photo by hive.

Because this cart features a straight vertical drop from where the handle attaches to the basket down to the rear axle, it's easy to measure, as the AAP put it, the "location of the handle and child seating area in relation to the rear axle" - it's the distance from the handgrip to the basket, just a few inches. But the legs of a child properly seated in this cart would also be outside the wheelbase, as would any other part that might project out over the handle (drawing, leaning forward to reach for a parent or an object in front of them, etc.). This decreases the amount of pressure a parent would have to put on the cart handle to tip it backward, and if this were done quickly - in conjunction, say, with the child increasing the weight they bear forward through their own movement - it becomes easier to imagine how these incidents occur.

This one looks to have an unusual amount of potential weight positioned outside of the wheelbase, although the angle of the photograph makes it a bit difficult to measure.


Photo by Caveman 92223.

This last one is the worst of the lot, and was undoubtedly decommissioned by a shopping cart designer turned masked vigilante. See how far back the handle extends from the horizontal position of the rear wheels?


Photo by Editor B.

Now imagine any of these carts with an infant car carrier strapped, balanced, or otherwise positioned in the cart's child seat. That changes everything again, doesn't it?

When it comes to child safety, not all shopping carts are created equal. The kinds with large plastic seating areas - a section with multiple belted seats positioned lower to the ground, between the basket and the handle, or the play vehicles where kids sit below the basket itself - have been, in part, a response by manufacturers to the tip-over problem - lowering kids' center of gravity and getting them firmly inside the wheelbase, as well as allowing for the safer belting of older children. But if the problem with standard shopping carts is one of simple physics, why not just have regulations mandating certain angles or limits on how far the basket can project out on a standard-issue shopping cart?

That's a question for the CPSC, says the AAP.

The CPSC denied petitions to promulgate mandatory standards for shopping carts in 1975, automatic child restraints in carts in 1994, and preventing cart tip-overs in 1998. At the time the petition was denied in 1975, the industry indicated that it would pursue development of a voluntary standard for shopping carts, but no action was taken until 2002. Thomas H. Moore, 1 of 3 CPSC commissioners who reviewed the petition in 1998 requesting a performance standard to prevent shopping cart tip-overs, indicated in a written minority opinion that he favored deferring a decision on the petition and pursuing a voluntary standard with the industry. The CPSC engineering staff stated at that time that it would be "a relatively straightforward matter" to develop a performance standard for shopping cart stability. However, the other 2 commissioners did not agree with Moore, and the petition was denied. In 1995, an industry spokesman articulated the view that "injuries involving shopping carts are due to consumer misuse of the product and are not flaws in the current design or a lack of safety mechanism." In September 2002, American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) International formed Subcommittee F15.56 on Shopping Carts to develop a voluntary standard for shopping carts. The Standard Consumer Safety Performance Specification for Shopping Carts F2372-04 was published in July 2004.

However, unlike the standards in 21 other countries, the ASTM standard does not address shopping cart stability. Stating that there were "not sufficient frequencies and severity of ‘tip-over’ injuries, relating to the cart’s stability, to warrant requirements and testing for 'tipover,'" the ASTM subcommittee voted to overrule the negative vote of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) against the draft standard and the recommendation of the AAP that a stability performance standard and test procedure be included in the shopping cart standard.

If you haven't read it yet, you should hop on over to Investigative Mommy Blogger and check out their great reporting on shopping cart safety, which includes injury stories from moms, interviews with representatives from the CPSC and the AAP, and more. We can't wait to read more reports from Kelby Carr's team.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is officially in force today, and its "final" (to date) form has surprises for everyone. The Consumer Product Safety Commission granted a year's "stay of enforcement" for new lead and phthalate limits that requires companies to pinky swear adherence to the new laws but doesn't require them to test their products for the now-banned substances. The CPSC went on to respond to critics of this move, including ZRecs, by issuing additional guidance assuring companies that manufacturers and retailers would not be prosecuted unless they were notified of violations and then kept selling the product.

The CPSC's website has been up and down for the past few hours. Its latest guidance for retailers, a "Small Business Guide" released today, includes a table of product types and how much to trust their safety. Examples from the list include:

• Cheap children’s metal jewelry: Best to test, contact the manufacturer, or not sell


• Unpainted/untreated wood toys: OK to sell


• Painted wooden or metal toys: Best to test, contact the manufacturer, or not sell


• Toys with soft plastic that are made for infants: Should be OK to sell if made for sale after February 10, 2009. If older (or if the date of manufacture is unknown) check with manufacturer or do not sell


• Dyed or undyed children’s clothing made from natural, untreated cotton, silk, wool, hemp, flax, linen, and other untreated natural materials including coral, amber, feathers, fur and leather: OK to sell


• Clothes with rhinestones, metal or vinyl snaps, zippers, closures or appliqués: Best to test, contact the manufacturer, or not sell

The CPSC has been adjusting its language release by release to reassure retailers and resellers that they are not in danger of being massively fined. This latest uses the term "knowingly," although it is hard to see how that particular distinction would hold up in court.

Then late last week a New York district court threw out the CPSC's interpretation of the phthalates ban, which the CPSC had interpreted as not applying to existing inventory. In short, that means any children's products containing levels of phthalates in excess of the new limits are banned for sale as of today. This move comes to you courtesy of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Public Citizen.

We've been tracking a few companies for the ZRecs Guide which have been quite reluctant to release phthalates information to us for publication. We'll be watching as stuff drops off their websites, and adding products to the guide based on the materials used and the timing of their disappearance. No items will be labeled as "high" confidence for our ratings without independent verification of the phthalates status with the company - which, presumably, has an interest in halting sales of products that could earn them $100,000 fines. Thanks to President Obama's new directive to federal agencies regarding Freedom of Information Act requests, we're also hopeful we'll be able to crack open more of these regulatory conversations between the CPSC and companies as they go down. Interesting times.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a one-year "stay of enforcement" for phthalate and lead testing by children's product manufacturers today.

Significant to makers of children’s products, the vote by the Commission provides limited relief from the testing and certification requirements which go into effect on February 10, 2009 for new total lead content limits (600 ppm), phthalates limits for certain products (1000 ppm), and mandatory toy standards, among other things. Manufacturers and importers – large and small – of children’s products will not need to test or certify to these new requirements, but will need to meet the lead and phthalates limits, mandatory toy standards and other requirements.

I know, gift horse and all, and an entire industry is breathing a collective sigh of relief, but do these terms give anyone else pause? The CPSC has just offered crafters, handmade toymakers, and corporate producers alike the same deal it already gave resellers earlier this month: You don't have to test the products you sell, but if we find one that doesn't meet the new standards, you're on the hook for fines - $100,000 per violation. From the stay of enforcement:

Handmade garment makers are cautioned to know whether the zippers, buttons and other fasteners they are using contain lead. Likewise, handmade toy manufacturers need to know whether their products, if using plastic or soft flexible vinyl, contain phthalates.

Or what? Well, or nothing. The CPSC is essentially saying it does not intend to enforce the ban it is mandated to enforce, for the period of one year. It can't actually say that it doesn't intend to enforce it. Here's what it can say:

The Commission trusts that State Attorneys General will respect the Commission's judgment that it is necessary to stay certain testing and certification requirements and will focus their own enforcement efforts on other provisions of the law, e.g. the sale of recalled products.

The gist of the CPSC's new ruling is this: "We cannot release you, the manufacturer (or crafter) from the requirement to meet these standards. We can relieve you of the obligation to prove to us that your products are safe, as we have now defined safety. However, we must state that you are still obligated to meet those safety requirements, even if we aren't requiring the testing; therefore, the ultimate burden of compliance remains with you, the manufacturer, although we do not intend to check, and are hoping that state agencies will follow our lead."

I see a few problems with this scenario.

1. The fundamental problem with the CPSIA's testing and certification requirements is that testing of various combinations of components makes it impossible for small producers to stay in business. A year delay does not solve this problem.


2. Producers who do take this year to develop a stronger awareness of their supply chain and the safety of the materials they use will not be in any better position to sustain the cost of testing a year from now. In other words, if I make children's clothes and I begin more carefully sourcing my snaps, buttons, zippers, and fabrics to ensure I am dealing with reputable companies that produce a quality product and perhaps even test themselves, I will still be required to do the same testing as someone who took no such steps. I may pass the test, where someone else would fail it, but the standards have never been the issue - it's the breadth of testing required in the first place.


3. Significant momentum has been building behind the need to fix this law, and some of that pressure will now be released.

It may be that this is the only way for the CPSC to offer relief this close to the February 10 deadline, and that they are just preparing the ground for Congress to take more time-consuming actions to fix the CPSIA over the next year. If that is the case, it might be legalistic to complain that they are making crafters, toymakers, and companies technically responsible for meeting a standard they now claim to be uninterested in enforcing.

But the law is the law. The state and federal government don't always walk lockstep on these issues - look at what happened in California with medical marijuana. What if some state - California, say, or Washington - decides to go ahead and test products and enforce the law? Or what if a consumer group that feels passionately about the new lead standards decides to do some independent testing and sue non-compliant companies for violating the new standard?

What do you think? Is this the best relief the handmade industry could hope for, or is it just one step towards fixing this legislation? If you're a producer, does your "responsibility" to be in compliance given these terms worry you, or are you comfortable assuming that you're safe until February 2010? Is there anything you'll try to do with this "extra" year on the assumption that the CPSIA itself might not get "fixed" by then?