Amy over at Crunchy Domestic Goddess has an interesting post recently about disposing of - and passing on - used children's toys, and it encouraged us to write about something that has been bothering us for a while here at ZRecs. From our point of view, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is one of the biggest reasons why the trashing of useful - and perfectly safe - children's toys is going to get worse, not better, in the years to come.

We review and process dozens of children's products every month - during the ramp-up to the holiday shopping season, sometimes hundreds. These products are evaluated and use-tested for inclusion in the ZRecs Guide, considered for inclusion in ZRecs gift guides and for stand-alone reviews, and written about and discussed in opportunities we are offered to discuss kids' products in other forums. (Most recently, we wrote about twenty or so kids' gift recommendations that went out to 800,000 families through another parenting site, and appeared in a safer holiday toys TV segment in Austin that aired in December.)

To make a long story short, 90% of the products we receive - almost all of which are solicited by us, not sent unsolicited - are removed from their packaging and very gently used. So it was with great distress that we discovered that one of the outcomes of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is that thrift stores around the country are beginning to stop stocking and selling most used children's items, everything from cribs - which probably shouldn't be on the secondhand market at all these days thanks to regular recalls of monstrous scope - to all manner of children's toys, games, and in some cases even books.

We live in College Station, Texas. Our local Goodwill stores no longer accept any used children's products, as a matter of policy, because of the cryptic but very real responsibility for total product safety that CPSIA places on them. (Please don't tell me thrift stores are off the hook. We've heard it, and they aren't. And "we probably won't have the resources to prosecute at your level" is not an acceptable business model, even for a charitable organization.) We have seen other cities where Goodwills and other thrift stores have enacted similar policies, and some that haven't. Even Goodwill stores, we learned in a call we placed to their national headquarters, can choose how to respond to CPSIA with regard to stocking children's toys.

Just before Christmas this year, we made our regular donation of still-in-the-box toys to a holiday toy drive - items we had not requested and had no interest in opening, and duplicates - you'd be surprised how often companies accidentally send two of an item, through some administrative glitch or another. But then we tried to donate a large number of items we had opened, used several times in play, photography, and adult assessment, but were in 'like new" condition, and had a very difficult time doing so. Our local Goodwill refused the toys entirely and the battered women's shelter would only take stuff that was still in the box. For everything out of its original packaging, we had to work really hard to find places that would accept use toys - many ended up going to local children's centers and waiting rooms that wouldn't be selling or giving away the toys, and thus were not covered under CPSIA.

For our purposes, it worked out fine. Things were a bit more hectic than usual but we tapped into a few new charities and outlets for the copious volume of stuff we receive and review. But it made our skin crawl to imagine how few parents would go through these hoops in order to get rid of used toys their children had outgrown or didn't like, or even Christmas gifts that fell quickly out of favor and needed a new home.

After Christmas had come and gone, we did a clean sweep of Z's old toys, getting rid of things she had outgrown or didn't really use under the auspices of making room for the new. Z was a trooper and gave up much more than we had anticipated, allowing us to free up space in her bedroom and the study that doubles as a playroom and make it easier for us to keep things clean and orderly so she can access the stuff she does love. But now I have two bins of toys sitting in my living room while I try to figure out what to do with them. My plan at this point is to list them on our local free email lists, but really, I'm pressed for time as it is and I'd much rather give those two giant bins of toys away in one fell swoop and have it over and done with! Listing them and making individual arrangements for pickup and so on and so forth is just barely within my ability to manage.

I can't stand to throw fun, safe, and useful toys away. But for someone less dedicated, I can imagine that those two giant bins of toys would have long been placed in a couple of giant trash bags and taken to the curb. And part of me can't blame them. My house is cluttered enough as it is and I barely have the time to scout around for places brave enough to accept them - including the vegetable-dyed wooden toys and organic cotton teethers and the other admirably safety- and environmentally-conscious children's products that make up the bulk of what we review. And not only do we fill up our landfills with these perfectly useful children's products, but where are children in families that rely on the used market - now and in the future - supposed to get toys and books? Do we just let them do without?

Almost everyone who follows what's happening at the CPSC knows that CPSIA is badly in need of fixing. The Commission itself has, after much floundering and self-contradiction, sent a list of recommended action items to Congress to address major problems in CPSIA - lead used in inaccessible product components (youth ATVs, bicycle valve stems, etc.), printed materials (books - a huge CPSIA problem, more on that in another post), the imposition of mass-production requirements on small crafters - but any better guidance or clearer regulation on the used children's market is a telling omission. The agency has also issued a second stay of enforcement on most provisions of the new law, just as it did one year ago.

We waited with bated breath for the CPSC to make its wish list of amendments to the law. Now that they have, it is looking clearer that secondhand children's goods are going to be left out in the cold even if the CPSIA is fixed - and we are going to see more and more dumpsters and dumps filling up because parents can't give the stuff away easily anymore.

Whether this problem will fade as a generation of children's products are purged from circulation is an unknown at this point. The CPSC would like us to think so, because most new products must be marked "indelibly" with the means to track them back to their source, so recalled items can be removed from the marketplace as they turn up at resellers. But this requires the CPSC to deliver a means for thrift stores to access this new, rich source of information about batches and lots of each and every children's product in a cost-effective manner, and certain types of products really cannot be marked in this way, and will be "rebels" once they are separated from their packaging, their tags are removed, or ink washes off.

It also begs the question of whether we are willing, as a society, to eject such a massive volume of newly-classified waste into our environment in order to protect ourselves from the portion that is truly unsafe, and enjoy the accompanying surge in downstream effects (phthalates leach just as well in landfills as they do in playrooms, although their route into our bodies may be less direct). The trouble is, no one asked us if we were; but it's happening, and if it isn't happening in your own backyard now, it will be before you know it.

If you'd like to learn more about our concerns about the CPSIA, from the perspective of bloggers who are all about safety in children's products, you can read the post we wrote about the CPSIA nearly a year ago today.