Digital Journal:
Kiki Fluhr, who runs the All the Numbers Handmade homecraft business from her Quincy, Massachusetts home, warns that the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which becomes effective from February 10 next year, will turn micro-businesses like hers into illegal manufacturers of “hazardous substances’ overnight.
This law includes hand-knitted, quilted and hand-sewn clothes, wooden toys and the myriad of other products for children which traditionally have been sold by arts-and-crafts shops countrywide for decades. These are usually produced by cash-strapped people at home.
She says that even granny’s home-made quilts sold in the local arts-and-crafts shop won’t be exempt from this new law.
Also disastrous is the fact that thousands of tons of these often exquisitely-handcrafted products in the pre-existing stock of shops also will have to be dumped as contraband which under this law will be deemed to contain ‘banned, hazardous substances’ after February 10 — because the Act is retroactive.
Each product will have be tested at huge cost and produce a certificate of compliance before it can be sold. Handcrafters say they can’t afford this huge price-tag of $4,000 for each test.
Photo by plex.