The Worst Toy on the Market

[naomikritzer]

So, there have been a series of scandals over the last six months involving lead in children's toys. Lead is bad for anyone, but it's particularly dangerous to young kids, so finding out that bright-eyed plastic Doras and wooden Thomas trains had been decorated with lead paint was startling and disturbing to many parents. (I'm not sure if I'm overstating or understating the case. The parenting bulletin board I post on was full of people saying things like "I'm never buying toys again! My kids are playing with sticks and rocks from now on!" But the mothers who post there may be slightly on the dramatic side.)

I've tried to keep an eye on the recalls, while also bearing in mind that the number of recalls and quantity of toys implies that there's surely stuff out there that should be recalled, but won't be. Mostly I deal with this by discouraging my kids from putting toys into their mouths, which you'd think wouldn't be an issue now that they're 7 and 4, but you'd be wrong.

The newest variation on the ongoing TOYS WILL KILL YOUR CHILDREN news story came out today: some independent group bought a bunch of toys and ran tests on them to see what nasty toxins they contained. They've now got a website up at http://www.healthytoys.org with their results. (The site was running very, very slowly when I visited earlier, as every parent in the U.S. compulsively checked the listings for every toy they have on the shelves.) Alas, they hadn't tested the toys I was most curious about, but they did have a Ten Best and Ten Worst list. The Ten Worst was broken down by toxin, as they tested not only for lead but for cadmium, chlorine/PVC, arsenic, and mercury.

This backpack appears to have contained all of them except cadmium. Just to shake up my own complacency about the high-quality toys being safer, it's also ridiculously expensive for a children's backpack ($45! Molly's Land's End backpack cost less than that, and we had it monogrammed!) The lead content was 2,378 PPM for the exterior, and 7,132 PPM for the interior.

The Consumer Products Safety Commission's standard is 600 PPM or less of lead.

Some of the manufacturers were protesting today that the chemical can be in the toy without it being a hazard -- in order to really be dangerous, it needs to be available to the child in the sense that they could gnaw off the leaded paint and swallow it. And the backpack does look fairly sturdy and difficult to gnaw apart.

Nonetheless, I feel reasonably confident naming this the Worst Toy on the Market. Especially as I'm pretty certain there are thousands of less expensive backpacks available that are not full of lead, mercury, cadmium, chlorine, and arsenic.

(Do you know what's even scarier than this backpack? Two of the three toys with the highest lead content were tea sets. 12,000 and 10,000 PPM of lead, respectively.)

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Eep! Those tea sets are appalling. That backpack is appalling. I can almost accept the protest that a child could not gnaw off the leaded paint and swallow it. But...puppy! Eep!

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Which toy were you most curious about?

[naomikritzer]

There were two I tried to look up.

1. American Girls dolls, because they're currently made in China but the company did some jumping up and down about their own safety standards back in the fall. And Molly owns two of them and is intensely fond of them.

2. Fiddlestix, which are similar to the old wood Tinker Toys. They're sold in many of the catalogs of old-fashioned natural toys. However, one review I read said that the red coloring on some of the sticks tends to come off if a kid sucks on it, which made me twitch and is one reason I haven't bought these for my kids. (They are made in China, though they're marketed in such a way that a lot of people think they're made in the U.S. I e-mailed Fat Brain toys and asked.)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yoicks! I must say, I'm experiencing a certain amount of sympathy with the rocks-and-sticks crowd just at the moment :P

[squigsoup.livejournal.com]

I don't wanna look I don't wanna look...Rachel got a nice tea set for her birthday, made of ceramic, that's just screaming to be full of lead. And she and her sister have pretend tea parties with it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Alex's grandparents just gave her a made-in-China ceramic tea set. We've really got to buy some of those home lead testing swabs.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw "Melissa and Doug" on their list of products. We have millions of Melissa & Doug toys, and I love them. Fortunately they seem to be okay.

Ceramic geekery

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with the tea sets as the site won't load for me, but it partly depends not on how much lead is in the set, or how that compares to other toys, but rather, how they compare to other commercial clays as are used for real tea sets.

A lot of clays do contain lead -- but if the glaze is up to commercial standards, then the lead is not going to be in contact with the drink, and is harmless unless and until the piece is chipped. (This is also one reason they tell you to throw out chipped or cracked pottery -- or at least stop using it for food if it's pretty and/or handmade if you don't know the composition of the clay).

And glazes often contain elements which, in their dust form or liquid state, you don't want to breathe in, or drink, (Or in rare cases, touch), but once fired, form a harmless and food safe glass. (And in its raw state, especially as dust, the silica is far more the issue for a potter to worry about than any other ingredient.) Clay is a weird thing, and the firing process does fascinating things to and with the deadly chemicals.

I'm not saying it makes it good or right, because:

A) How often does a kid's tea set get cracked?

B) How likely is it that the parent will know or want to take a chipped cup away from a (girl) who treasures the whole matched piece?

C) Before you panic and throw out* your beloved but chipped mug, there are definitely many commercial clays which do not contain lead and/or contain minimal amounts, and/or are fired in such a way that even when chipped they should be safe.

I'm mostly just wondering how much the people testing know about this side and whether it affected their test results at all, or if they only went "Ack! bad substance!" without knowing there might be more context.

*I wouldn't throw out the piece anyhow; I'd be inclined to turn it into a plant pot, a holder for dry candies (Since it requires liquid to leach the lead out of a clay anyhow), or tell my daughter to always, always give the chipped cup to the stuffed foxie.

Re: Ceramic geekery

[naomikritzer]

One of the frustrating things about the whole YOUR TOYS WILL KILL YOUR CHILDREN news story is that no one is really explaining these sorts of things. The story boils down to "LEAD! IN THIS TOY!" followed by a discussion of all the horrible dangers of lead.