CPSIA – Wingnuts Against Cadmium

740 days have passed since ANY Democrat in Congress did ANYTHING to help us on the CPSIA. There are 71 days left until Election Day.

On Thursday, in an unannounced Federal Register notice (you all read the Fed. Reg. for fun like me, right?), the CPSC announced that a petition had been filed by four esteemed consumer groups demanding that the CPSC and EPA issue rules against the presence of cadmium in children’s products, especially “toy jewelry”. Not doubt this effort was coordinated with Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) to assist her in her reelection effort. The four consumer groups are the Sierra Club, Empire State Consumer Project, Rochesterians Against the Misuse of Pesticides (hmmm) and, our ole’ pal, the Center for Environmental Health. Although the petition has not resulted in action by the agency YET, they have requested comments on the petition. Goodie, something else to waste our time on!

The only reason I know about this event is that Bloomberg.com wrote about it last Wednesday. I am sure you monitor Bloomberg for sneak requests for comment by the agency, just like me. If you go the CPSC website, good luck finding a reference to this important Fed. Reg. publication. Oh well, the CPSIA already legislates that we must be telepathic anyhow.

The cadmium mania has nothing to do with health or safety. Even the wingnuts behind this petition are unable to cite a single injury EVER from cadmium in children’s products. They ask that rules be implemented “before a child dies or is seriously injured”. Well, since this regulation never existed previously and cadmium has been used as a trace component in jewelry for hundreds of years, the argument that this is a “real” risk does not impress me. I hold a degree in engineering but who am I to tell the CPSC how to do math. What do you suppose the probability of injury might be if the instances are ZERO over hundreds of years involving literally trillions of human interactions? Pretty high, I guess . . . .

They better be pretty high, if the CPSC actually cares what the law says. Ha, I gave up on that a long time ago, but for you devotees, here’s the deal. I have written about this many times already – the suthority to recall consumer products derives from the FHSA which restricts the agency’s authority to “imminent hazards”. Section 12(a) of the FHSA provides this definition: “As used in this section, and hereinafter in this Act, the term ‘imminently hazardous consumer product’ means a consumer product which presents imminent and unreasonable risk of death, serious illness, or severe personal injury.” [Emphasis added] Is it even theoretically possible for a consumer product containing cadmium to meet this standard if there are exactly zero documented injuries – ever? Of course, we have been told that “anecdotes are not evidence” . . . unless perhaps a consumer group is dishing out the (imaginary) anecdotes.

And then there’s the mania in the press. The press seems no better able to evaluate this threat than any of the other urban legends underlying the CPSIA. One wonders how they assess other risks . . . like swimming pool deaths. Oh yeah, real deaths are not a problem if the activity is really fun, like swimming which claims hundreds of children’s lives annually. Better to put our resources into cadmium testing – since there are no recorded events of cadmium injury from consumer products. Consider this quote from Bloomberg: “Retailers such as Dress Barn Inc. and Claire’s Boutiques Inc. have recalled necklaces, earrings and bracelets this year after finding cadmium in the products. McDonald’s Corp. offered $3 refunds in June to customers who bought “Shrek” drinking glasses with high levels of cadmium in the paint.” [Emphasis added] I have pointed out ad nauseum that the CPSC admits that the Shrek glasses are SAFE but given that the recall went forward and no one remembers what happened, those glasses had to be really dangerous, right??? According to Bloomberg, that seems to be true.

The petition features the usual hyperbolic description of an imaginary crisis with hysterical references to a “rising tide” of incidents (poisonings) and unfounded accusations of manufacturers “substituting” cadmium for lead. Shame that facts hardly matter anymore. They pull out all the stops to embellish their case. If repeated enough, this kind of reasoning becomes accepted as a truth, just like “no safe levels of lead”. Our “leaders” seem prone to this kind of duping.

My favorite part of the petition is the assertion of the dire threat posed by cadmium. Again, there are no reported injuries from cadmium EVER in consumer products. The CSPC admitted at last February’s ICPHSO meeting that their only toxicological data on cadmium relates to workplace exposure (generally airborne). According to Wikipedia, two big sources of cadmium for humans are food and cigarette smoke. The CPSC has literally NO data on risk from consumer products – principally because there is NO evidence that there is any danger. Given the data, they made the judgment that gathering the data was a waste of money (back when people cared about such things). The most famous incident of widespread cadmium poisoning related to scandalous industrial pollution in Japan over many years. That’s a far cry from the situation confronting America today.

Should we crush the toy jewelry market or pummel the rest of us with high testing costs and other legal disruptions because our regulators are unable to distinguish between industrial pollution in Japan on a massive scale, and enamel or jewerly solder with traces of cadmium in it?

According to the wingnuts, yes, we should.

And I remind you – we have 71 days left until Election Day. I recommend that you give generously to candidates that don’t come from Mars, have some semblance of common sense and commit in blood to oppose the junk science movement that has taken over the CPSC and Congress. Work the neighborhoods, greet people at train stations and then go vote in droves.

If we hurry, we might get something done before the CPSC turns the screw one more rotation.

Read more here:
CPSIA – Wingnuts Against Cadmium

CPSIA – What Constitutes "Safe"?

One of the tragedies of the CPSIA melodrama is that the consumer groups have completely hijacked the concept of safety, turning it utterly away from concepts of risk assessment. To what, you say? Away from management of identifiable risks to avoidance/elimination of perceived risks. In other words, Congress and our regulators now ignore the data on risk and focus instead on the possibility of risk. The POSSIBILITY of injury, not the actuality of injury.

How much of a difference is this? Pretty big, to judge by the frenzy over cadmium in jewelry. Seven Senators have sponsored a bill called the Safe Kids’ Jewelry Act. This law would ban the use of cadmium in kids’ jewelry. Is this “good”? I am not sure how to answer that. To my knowledge, no one has identified a single injury from cadmium in children’s jewelry. It is undeniable that cadmium is a bad element and has the potential to harm. Ergo, jewelry with cadmium is “bad”? I can imagine circumstances where cadmium in jewelry might hurt a child. Then again, if it were so dangerous, where are all the victims?

If this is going to be the new standard, whether a product MIGHT harm someone, I think we are cooked. Assuming that “prevention of possible injury” is to be used as the standard to evaluate products or components of products, let me ask a few questions to see if I understand the “new rules of the road”:

• How certain must the prospect of injury be?
• How specific must the circumstances of the prospective injury be?
• Are we talking about probable injury (more than 50%) or possible injury (odds greater than 0%)? How are those odds to be measured – by unit sold, by contact, by owner, by year, by lifetime use? What’s “reasonable”? [Does anyone care what's reasonable?]
• Are all things that could possibly injure a child now illegal on the same basis?
• If the answer is yes, when will all those other products be banned and/or recalled? Is equity in the treatment of all products “important”?
• If the answer is no, then where do we draw the line?
• How relevant is it that no injuries have been reported?
• How many incidents are required before we declare a product or substance illegal or recalled? How many newspaper articles, editorials or CEH lawsuits are required?
• What responsibility do we have to be consistent in the administration of these rules?

Consistency, that’s important, don’t you think? If cadmium is now tacitly illegal because it might harm a child, do we have to make everything with the possibility of injury to children illegal?

Presumably, since no injuries to children from cadmium has been reported and the Washington Post confirms that doctors do not perceive cadmium as a serious risk (perhaps because it was not prevalent in house paint or in gasoline, hmmm), then anything with the same level of prospective risk would be illegal. That’s more or less everything from water to chicken bones to lead to ruthenium. [Pardon me, ruthenium, one of the world's most expensive and dangerous elements, is a-okay to include in children's products.] Why then aren’t we closing swimming pools which cause more than 250 deaths each year? What about water – you can drown in two inches of water. No more showers?

Is there something special about cadmium, besides that it has appeared in an Associated Press article?

The mania over the prevention of possible injury has turned the business environment into a feeding frenzy that will drive the business community down, down, down. Is that in anyone’s interest? Will we all be safer if we have nothing to buy?

Please consider that the House Energy and Commerce Committee has today weighed in on the Toyota recall. Yes, the same Henry Waxman who is torturing our industry has now turned his talons and sharp teeth on Toyota. Toyota enjoys one of the finest reputations for quality and service in the world. It is renowned as a business leader – and proactively took strong medicine in its gas pedal recall. This is not enough for the venomous Democrats who hate businesses. They need to dig deeper and perhaps damage Toyota enough to help GM and Chrysler, owned by the U.S. government and unions. Bringing the great low, that’s the new American way of the Democrats. It makes me SICK.

I want to close with a note about cows – did you know that cows are killers, too? Yes, they are – the New York Times reports:

“The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article, published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reporting that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States. In some cases, the cows actually attack humans — ramming them, knocking them down, goring them, trampling them and kicking them in the head — resulting in fatal injuries to the head and chest.”

COWS kill 20 people a year, cadmium has apparently killed ZERO. We are running pell-mell to ban cadmium from jewelry because a misguided newspaper article fueled panic. Are cows next? Should they be? If cadmium jewelry goes away and cows stay unregulated, will respect for our laws remain?

Respect for Congress, that’s another thing.

Read more here:
CPSIA – What Constitutes "Safe"?