Consumer ratings portal GoodGuide made a major misstep last weekend when they called out "the season's hottest toys," including the robot hamsters Zhu Zhu Pets, as containing "banned levels" of a couple of metals. A press release sent to every outlet under the sun (us included) entitled "Hottest Holiday Toys High in Hazardous Chemicals: GoodGuide Finds Levels of Antimony & Chromium Above Legal Limits in Some of Season's Most Popular Toys," led to their story being featured on every major news broadcast and in papers and blogs around the country.

Everyone makes mistakes, but this is the kind consumer reporters have nightmares about.

As others were quick to point out, all regulated heavy metals except lead are restricted not by their presence in an object, but by how much can be extracted using a predetermined method. In theory, this process is designed to mimic the outer limits of exposure an individual would have through the use of the product. In most cases, the material must both be "accessible," i.e. in a part of the product that a user could reasonably come into contact with, and soluble, meaning it is expected to come out or off within the use life of the product. This is the way BPA will be regulated, if and when it is - by how much comes out when it is exposed to certain conditions.

Unfortunate errors like this set our clocks back a bit regarding the public's willingness to engage with safety issues raised by independents like us. As one of the hundreds of furious comments on GoodGuide's blog put it:

When my wife and I saw the story on our local news that Zhu Zhu pets were considered toxic to children, we decided to take them back to our local Target and Toys r us store the very next day. Now we have learned that they are ok for children, now I cannot find them on store shelves so my two daughters will not be getting them for Christmas. They went as far as to cross them off of their Christmas lists to Santa, along with the Razor scooter and other toys listed on this site. This hasn't ruined our Christmas but it sure threw a wrench into our gift plans for our two daughters. I have spent the last week going to Wal-Mart, Toys R Us and Target to try and at least get two hamsters with no luck finding anything. I had returned two hamsters and seven accessories which were hard enough to find in November. Thanks Good Guide for the headache. {Comment #19 on this post)

GoodGuide has since published some testing protocols they plan to follow in the future, and it's a step in the right direction. We also look forward to seeing them do some more rigorous testing we can all benefit from.

We'll be establishing some protocols of our own here at ZRecs for claims made by advocacy groups and for conclusions drawn from research. These new public guidelines will codify practices we already follow, and it may improve on them. Our hope is that this will help make explicit that ZRecs is a resource you can turn to not for the shocking reversal of the month but for grounded, meaningful findings and alerts.

So enjoy your Zhu Zhu Pets, America. I don't want one, but I do think they look kind of fun.

The limited value of XRF

As the dust settles, it's worth mentioning why we don't place much value in the kind of data GoodGuide's "partner" The Ecology Center (publishers of HealthyStuff.org and several related sites) have been amassing over the past couple of years for children's products like toys and car seats. We have never recommended XRF data as a guide to selecting toys or other children's products, and this seems like a good time to explain why.

An XRF scanner can't tell you anything about exposure. HealthyStuff.org's own disclaimer makes that clear. In the case of lead, it can provide you with an accurate assessment of whether a product violates federal standards. Even then, follow-up testing using destructive methods (extraction in an acidic solution) are invaluable - that's why California's attorney general called on Target to do their own investigation into the lead we found in their onesies, but to stop selling them immediately as a precautionary measure.

But we don't see a lot of value in XRF testing beyond testing for lead, except as what it was designed to be - an initial screening tool to determine whether further testing is warranted. XRF offers a thirdhand marker for potential phthalates (high chlorine is suggestive evidence of PVC, which may in some cases contain phthalates but is unlikely to given current regulations), and we have heard of some parents basing car seat selections primarily on XRF readings, which we strongly discourage.

Our own product safety guide, the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, doesn't rely on testing because good testing is cost-prohibitive. We rely on company statements regarding what their products do or don't contain, and quantify our confidence in their claims due to company history, transparency, and documents they may have shared with us on a confidential basis. Our model for expansion of our services is to raise funds to independently test highly suspect products, and we'd encourage GoodGuide to put some of its funds to that end, particularly in the areas of biological testing (to screen for any endocrine disrupting chemicals), nanoparticles, and other unregulated or poorly-regulated ingredients of concern.

To make a long story short, the rise of XRF in evaluating consumer product safety can be closely correlated with an abuse of the term "toxic" within the advocacy community. We'd like to see the rhetoric moderated before more parents start shrugging off the warnings that really matter.