SmallBizResource:
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, set to become law Feb. 10, has the right idea at heart: to ensure children’s toys are safe for them to play with.
The CPSIA, enacted last year after all of those scary recalls of toys made in China, prohibits kids’ products from being made and sold if they cross a certain threshold of lead containment and phthalates (used in glue, paint, plastic, etc.). So far, so good. The act also stipulates that all toys and clothing are third-party tested to ensure compliance, and that means each separate piece of a single toy (buttons, paint, etc).
And that’s where small businesses, many of which are already struggling, take issue. It’s not the testing, per se, they have a problem with. Rather, it’s the cost of testing, which they say will run them upward of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per toy and — especially in this economy — put them out of business.
“The safety standards are perfectly reasonable, but the testing costs are not sustainable for a microbusiness,” said Dan Marshall, founder of the Handmade Toy Alliance, in an interview with CNNMoney.com. “There’s no sense of scale, no exemptions based on the size of the business. It doesn’t make sense for someone who’s knitting kids’ hats in their living room to pay hundreds of dollars to test each hat.”
The Handmade Toy Alliance, which set up a Facebook page and is urging people to write to their legislators, maintains the CPSIA’s language needs to be modified to resemble exemptions granted by the FDA for small producers under the food labeling laws.
Photo by danzo08.