Product Safety Commission petitioned for more sensible testing practices
Current testing practices cost manufacturers millions of dollars to comply. New testing recommendations are said to significantly reduce costs and maintain test reliability.
Intertek and the Ammerican Apparely and Footwear Association (AAFA) jointly submitted a petition to
formally request that the Consumer Product Safety Commission CPSC approve certain
lab testing procedures to determine the presence of lead paint on toys and
other children’s products. The two groups maintain that these methods will
save manufacturers millions of dollars without any loss of test reliability.
Since the enactment of the landmark Consumer Product Safety
Improvement Act of 2008, some assert that the law only allows testing labs like
Intertek to test final, finished products to mandatory safety standards,
including the ban on lead paint. Because some products may have only a small
area of paint (like the fingernails on a doll or painted buttons on a child’s
garment), this interpretation requires the destruction of an unnecessarily
large number of product samples, since the paint must be scraped from the
samples, rendering them unusable. These samples–sometimes several hundred per
product–are then discarded. This represents a huge cost to manufacturers, which
discourages companies from testing and needlessly impacts the environment with
discarded samples.
Specifically, the two groups have requested the agency
recognize the acceptability of “spray sampling” (painting an entire
product with the same color paint, giving lab workers more surface coating to
test), “multiple stamping” (stamping products repeatedly with the
same paint or ink applique to garner a larger sample) and “finished
component testing,” allowing painted buttons, for example, to be tested
before they are sewn onto a garment rather than destroying the finished garment
during testing.
Read these other Control Engineering product safety-related
articles
• Businesses speak out against terms in consumer product
safety act
product safety: Are testing labs needed or is a supplier’s declaration enough?
– Edited by David Greenfield , editorial director
Control Engineering Sustainable Engineering News Desk
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