Let's substitute an unregulated toxin for the forbidden ones

[sfriedberg]

I chose the subject for this thread with extreme sarcasm. But that's what's happening.

The Associated Press just carried a story (read it in my hardcopy newspaper, so no hyperlink, sorry) about imported Chinese jewelry being made with large amounts of cadmium. By "large", they mean anywhere between 25 percent and 90 percent. NOT talking about parts per million here!

Apparently, some factories that were making cheap trinkets with low melting temperature alloys high in lead (a practice followed in the US for many years, long ago) have switched over to using alloys high in cadmium. And the CPSIA's restrictions on lead in toys is apparently a driving factor (as is the low price for cadmium in China).

While cadmium is not the "consumer scary" element that lead has become, it is toxic enough to be a concern even for adults. By some standards, it is more toxic than lead. OSHA describes cadmium as "an extremely toxic metal". The US Centers for Disease Control rank cadmium #7 on a list of nearly 300 environmental hazards. It was widely used as a corrosion-resistant plating on industrial fasteners, and has been phased out of that application as too hazardous for casual handling. It was also used in red and yellow paint pigments (in much the same role as lead.) It is still used in NiCd batteries.

The article points out that swallowing one of these cadmium-rich trinkets will give a kid, within a few hours, the equivalent of many years' of maximum-permitted-exposure.

I don't have any information beyond what's in the article, so I don't know how widespread the use of cadmium actually is in these imported trinkets, or how trustworthy the testing procedures were. But the article did make several useful points:

• Factories are switching from forbidden toxic materials to less-regulated toxic materials instead of taking the real point and moving to non-toxic ones.
  
• Despite the draconian provisions of the CPSIA, there are still major loopholes. The use of cadmium is restricted in painted toys. Cadmium in industrial scrap is controlled as hazardous material! But there are no existing regulations about permitted levels of cadmium in unpainted jewelry.
  
• Use of lead has dropped dramatically, close to the CPSIA mandated limts.
  
• Substitution of cadmium for lead is by no means universal. Depending on which list you look at, either 2% or 10% of the items that previously would have contained lead examined had cadmium. Zinc (which is fairly safe) is probably the most common substitution.

[Lisa Blank]

Stu, I saw an online article about this yesterday but didn't get to post. I have to admit that I really wasn't surprised that the substitution has been made. After all, it's cheap and legal.

[mhswope]

NPR had a report on this very thing this morning. Bet the laws will change.

Marguerite

[Esther]

The sad thing is that pre-CPSIA, the CPSC had the power to immediately take care of this. Now they can't because they are severely limited on how regulations can be written. All they can do is PR and eventually write a regulation that has the best, scientific standards and peer review (would take months, if not years). Of course politicians and media are jumping on the idea of a "new" law. That would be disastrous, IMO, because it wouldn't begin to address the underlying problems that now exist at the CPSC.