We have been in email and phone communication with Melissa & Doug's President, Doug Bernstein, over the past week seeking additional information regarding Melissa & Doug toys that were recalled in Canada for excess levels of the heavy metal barium. We opened up our correspondence to readers with an open letter to the company president on Friday, in which we sought the answers to specific questions about the safety of Melissa & Doug toys.

Yesterday, we got even more than we'd asked for from a company that is clearly prepared to demonstrate its commitment to safe products above and beyond the "trust us, we're good people" approach of many toy industry executives.

Below you'll find detailed responses to our questions in a Q&A Mr. Bernstein sent to us yesterday, and which we're publishing in its entirety here. But first, I'd like to highlight two outstanding things Melissa & Doug have done to respond to our concerns about their products:

1. Under the same conditions of privacy we offer to all companies, the company provided us with multiple lab testing reports for the three toys recalled in Canada for their barium content - 21 tests in all. Specific, proprietary company information was redacted from these reports, and we received the reports without any associated testing dates. But these test results do show each of the three toys passing U.S. testing standards by significant margins, not only for barium but for all regulated heavy metals including lead, for all phthalates now regulated under CPSIA, and for formaldehyde. Although these are a "slice" of the company's testing that has been selected for our review, we have no reason to believe that these results are not typical, as they represent several testing instances for each toy, and show levels far below the regulatory threshold for all chemicals of concern.


2. In the letter below, Melissa & Doug has made a public commitment to hold all of their products to the Canadian barium standard, in addition to the import country's regulatory testing standard for barium.

We believe these two moves by the company should provide parents with reasonable assurance that future Melissa & Doug toys will meet not only U.S. regulatory standards but, in the case of barium, the most health-protective barium standard currently in effect worldwide.

Doug Bernstein answers ZRecs questions

Below is Doug's letter, in its entirety, provided for publication in response to our open letter.
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To the editors and readers of ZRecommends:

Thanks for this opportunity to respond to your questions. In the past we've been a bit leery about answering questions we felt would reveal proprietary information about the way we operate, but your continued interest in these answers, especially the questions we've received from the Editor of ZRecommends, has compelled us to provide answers we've been reluctant to provide in the past. I won't take up your time with introductions, I'll get right to the most critical questions you've been asking:

1. What is the status of these items in the USA? As indicated in a previous email [to Z Recommends], these items pass the US testing standards for barium. This is verified by laboratory test reports, indicating passing results, which were conducted contemporaneously by three of the most reputable certified and scientific 3rd party test labs in the world. Incidentally, we've also been asked if it's possible these items pass now but won't pass in February 2010, and the answer to that is an emphatic "no." Please understand, the standard itself is not changing in February 2010, it's merely becoming a mandatory standard at that time, it has previously been a voluntary standard. But for every product made by every manufacturer, if it passes the U.S. standard today it will pass in February 2010.


2. Will we make these test reports available to you to examine? These reports contain a vast amount of information which is irrelevant to the issue of safety, but is what we consider proprietary information and a confidential part of our business operation. We hope you understand, for example, why we would not want to splash across the internet, for anyone in the world including our competitors to see, exactly where we make each of our products, or exactly how many we make, or how many are in each production run, or how exactly we put together each product, or when we make them, or who we ship them to, or the production patterns of our batches and schedules, etc. That's why we previously offered Z Recommends the opportunity to have their lawyer review these documents in our office after signing appropriate confidentiality guarantees. However, since there are understandably difficulties in embracing that offer, and since it appears there's some skepticism about these reports, we've decided to make a one-time exception to our privacy policy and we've sent these reports to the editors of ZRecommends, with the proprietary information blacked out, but this will allow the editors to relay to their readers whether or not these reports do indeed show passing test results for these items.


3. What exactly are the barium levels of our products - are they close to the limits? As evidenced by the laboratory reports, not only did we pass the US barium test, but the results were significantly below the limits. We weren't below the limits by only 5% or 7% or even 10% - on average, our results were anywhere from 70% - 90% BELOW the barium standard for the U.S.


4. Why, then, is there an issue with these items in Canada? As Z Recommends alluded in one of their posts, Canada has a very different approach to barium than the US does. This is important to know. To draw an analogy, there are tests all toy companies do for small parts. A certain amount of force is applied to an item to see if it can cause a small part to break free. Let's suppose the standard for one country says we should apply 20 pounds of force, but the standard in another country says we should apply 50 pounds of force. Clearly, we (and all manufacturers) would have some items pass in country A and some items fail in country B. The point being the same limit for barium applies in Canada as well as the USA (1000 ppm), but the key is, HOW is the barium extracted. Meaning, it doesn't just "ooze" out of a product, certain "extraction forces" are used to take out the barium in order to make it "accessible" and then to say how much there is. And the fact is, Canada and the U.S. use very different processes to extract the barium out of the product.


5. What exactly is the difference? We've been told the main difference is that in Canada, they use an HCl solution measured at a strength of 5% to do the extraction, and in the USA they use an HCl solution measured at a strength of 0.06 to 0.07% to do the extraction. That's a very big difference, Canada's extraction solution is approximately 80 times higher as a percentage than the solution used by the US for extraction. Incidentally, my understanding is that Europe's methodology is more similar to that of the U.S. (About two years ago, we were told by one lab the US strength was 0.22%, not 0.06 to 0.07%, so we're not sure if that's been reduced from 0.22% to 0.06% during this time period, but in any event, even at 0.22%, Canada's percentage at 5% is still about 23 times higher as a percentage). I was told there are other differences also, dealing with the sequence of events in the testing procedure and the time-element for each phase, and I'm guessing some of these partially offset the 80x differential in the HCl %, but we've been told it's commonly acknowledged in the testing community the net effect of all these differences is that the Canadian test for barium is more rigorous than the U.S. test, due to differences in the extraction process. I'm not a scientist, and I can't offer a scientific explanation for this, but it does seem to make sense to me that an extraction chemical with 5% strength would likely yield different testing results than an extraction chemical at 0.06 or 0.07%, the very same way 50 pounds of pressure exerted on a small part would likely yield a different result than 20 pounds of pressure exerted on a small part. Incidentally, here's a statement we received about 18 months ago from Bureau Veritas, one of the largest and most reputable testing laboratories in the world, addressing this exact topic, pasted here verbatim: "Although the limit of soluble Barium content for ASTM and Canada are the same (1000 mg/kg), please note their testing method are totally different. Please be informed that the acid used for CHPA heavy metals extraction is 5% HCl. But for ASTM soluble test, ~0.22% HCl was used. Due to the big difference between the concentrations used, it is very common for a surface coating failed the CHPA Barium requirement but meet the ASTM's one." (Ada Sze, Heavy Metal Department, Chemical Division, Bureau Veritas)


6. What levels of barium did we have in the items Health Canada and M&D recalled in Canada and how does that compare to items we have in the U.S.? For these three items which failed Health Canada's testing, only some of the units failed, other units passed. When there were failures, the barium rates were in the low-1000 and mid-2000 range (the limit is one thousand). Although we're not at all pleased that we would have even a single unit slip through that's over 1000, we also have to remember that many units did in fact pass the rigorous Canadian test, and those that failed came nowhere close to some of the astronomical scores we've all read some other products had for lead and other heavy metals last year, often having failure rates in the 40,000 to 50,000 range, with one of the most widely talked about heavy metal recalls last year soaring to the 100,000 ppm range. To re-emphasize, we'll NEVER be satisfied with even one unit even an iota over the 1000 ppm standard, and the truth is we're glad Health Canada has shown us we can and must do even better. Our top production and quality manager from the U.S. has spent the majority of this holiday season living in Asia, locking things down even tighter than before. In fact, we're now testing our products, no matter what country they ship to, not only to the import country's testing standard, but also to the more rigorous Canadian testing methodology for the barium test, which will help assure we pass the U.S. test by an EVEN WIDER margin than the 70 - 90% buffer we currently average. The bottom-line is we will continue to strive for 100% perfection, and we will NOT be satisfied until we achieve that.


7. Who oversees our factory inspections and testing in Asia? We have our own team of employees who handle this for us, these are full time employees who work only for Melissa & Doug, who live in China and personally handle all our inspections and quality control. This is not just one or two people, it's many, about 50, and this is all they do. We have long-running relationships with our factories; in fact, our largest factory we have been working with for about 16 years. We're considered one of the toughest US companies to work for. We've rejected many factories who wanted to work for us. More impressively, many have rejected us, telling us they would never want to work to the standards we require. Typically, in the past, factories were notorious for saying to their U.S. partners, "Don't worry, we have done all the testing, you don't need to." Well, we're different. Since day one, we've always demanded 24/7 access to the production line, and we've always demanded that we personally select any samples we want for testing which we immediately bring to scientific testing laboratories for testing. Only after these samples pass testing do we allow production runs to be boxed up. But that's not the only time we test. We also test prior to production, for example we test the paint when it is still in wet format, not yet applied to the products. We also test after painting, at final production stage, to be sure nothing happened during the application process. And on a random basis, we also test again when they arrive at our warehouses here in the U.S., for only one reason: Because we are obsessed with doing this right.

Again, I want to thank the editors and readers of ZRecommends again for allowing us to respond to your questions.

Best wishes to all of you for the holiday season.

Doug

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This is Jennifer again. Here are a few more relevant notes from us.

Are toys similar to those recalled in Canada safe for use in the U.S.?

There is no way for us to prove, given information that has been provided to us or, for that matter, any we could conceive of reasonably requesting from Melissa & Doug, that all Shape Sorting Cubes, Slice & Bake Cookie Sets, and Pound A Peg toys sold in the U.S. contain safe levels of barium. The failed product samples could represent a bad batch that slipped through their testing process - with high volume testing, in Melissa & Doug's case, comes mass-scale toy production - and we have received no evidence or indication that samples from the same batch that failed in Canada were tested to U.S. standards and passed.

However, the essential point that launched our investigation - of whether toy samples that failed a Canadian test would have failed U.S. tests - appears to us to be resolved within a reasonable degree of certainty. We have received a full detailing of the differences in U.S. and Canadian testing protocols that explain possible discrepancies in results, and any misgivings anyone might have about defending a less rigorous standard as "safe enough" should be satisfied by Melissa & Doug's commitment to hold all of their toys accountable to the Canadian barium testing protocol, a promise which speaks well to their claims of being "obsessed" with meeting the highest standards possible.

Ultimately, whether to continue to use one of these toys is a personal choice. If we still had our Shape Sorting Cube, would we take it away from our daughter? We have experience soliciting and acquiring intelligence from a lot of companies, and we have never worked with a major toy company head with his finger as squarely on the pulse of company operations as Doug Bernstein. Is this an ironclad guarantee that the specific toys tested in Canada wouldn't have failed a U.S. test? No. But given how extensively and thoroughly the company has responded to our requests for information, the level of risk that remains is so small that it would not cause us to take the toy from a child, and we believe the company's willingness to publicly commit to meeting a stricter testing standard than necessary on a voluntary basis speaks volumes about the company's priorities.

If you have one of these toys and are considering discarding it, feel free to take it away from your child but please wait to get rid of it until you hear an important announcement from us tomorrow. We are working on an opportunity for readers to contribute to a possible testing project to confirm these toys' safety, and if readers fund the initiative we will need sample products.

Our commitment to readers

At ZRecs we consider it our responsibility to solicit information and responses from company officials prior to publishing anything we anticipate could benefit from interpretation or feedback, and did so in this case, publishing our initial findings only after nearly a week's silence on the part of company executives. However, we also decided long ago - based on long experience working with public relations professionals and company representatives on a variety of sensitive topics - that we would not allow a failure to respond, in and of itself, to prohibit us from reporting on an issue where we saw significant evidence of wrongdoing or possible harm. There are also cases in which publication prior to notifying company officials is an essential step in achieving public safety goals.

The balancing act is making sure we aren't trying to leverage the real or threatened publication of questionable information in order to gain access to executives or data. Why? Because to do so would be to manipulate our readers' emotions as a tool to drive change. This is, to put it bluntly, a tactic we see as endemic to many safety and environmental advocacy organizations, and it makes us distrust many of the claims of organizations we'd otherwise love to support. Our passion for telling the truth as we see it is the core motivator behind everything we do at ZRecs, and for us, honesty trumps long-term ideological strategizing every time they come into conflict. To do any less would be to fail the readers who have placed their trust in us.

We would like to assure readers that despite the dramatic and we believe positive outcome of this inquiry - the voluntary observance of stricter testing standards at one of the country's largest manufacturers of wooden children's toys - we have, at all stages of this story, published only what we believed to be true based on the best information we could access, and in response to an avalanche of online concern and confusion in an information vacuum. As with other stories, we made efforts throughout to offer caveats regarding the verifiability of the information we chose to publish, outlined reasoning that led us to our provisional conclusions, and publicly shared specific informational needs to resolve the issue in order to avoid a witch hunt that would put a company in a no-win situation. We hope that our ongoing commitment to those strategies, more than any corporate or public policy outcome, is what helps make Z Recommends one of your trusted sources for product safety information in a jungle of options.

The lesson for companies producing safe products is the same as it ever was. The combination of rising public concern regarding consumer product safety and the dominance of new channels for sharing information online have created an environment in which companies must rapidly respond to rising concerns or confusion regarding their products, even (or especially!) if they believe these concerns to be in error.