Green Leaf Report

I recently put together a list of my top 10 green lifestyle changes, and I left off one item, because it wasn’t a change, it was so ingrained in the way I was raised:  buy locally made items.  Over the years, I’ve adjusted this attitude somewhat because locally produced goods can be so hard to find; now I either buy locally made items or second hand items.  Either way, I tell myself that my money doesn’t leave the area, I keep older items out of landfills, and I create no demand for more new items to be produced in foreign factories with debatable labor practices.

My thin rationalization has meant that I have a lot of Chinese-made toys around the house: After years of garage-sailing and thrift-store hunting, many of the toys I find are produced in those foreign factories.  Earlier this year I purchased two large milk-crates full of oversized lego-type blocks at a garage sale for $1 per crate; at the time I thought they were useful, educational toys.  I’ve been closely watching the recalls of Chinese made toys over the last several months, but last night was the first time I noticed reports on any of my sons’ toys: those same mega blocks have now been tested as containing lead (primarily the yellow blocks).

When I read the report of how the lead tests are conducted I got angry; this standard test is beyond wimpy:

When testing plastic toys that are not painted, Health Canada, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission and Bureau Veritas, a testing lab under contract to Mega Brands, perform what the industry calls a migration test.

Mr. Chizick said such tests simulated how much lead would seep out of a toy if, for example, a child put it in his or her mouth.

Donald L. Mays, the senior director of product safety planning at Consumers Union, which publishes the magazine Consumer Reports, said migration tests typically analyzed a solution, often vinegar, that was left sitting on the toy’s surface for a period of time.

The test (under so much debate in the article) which showed high levels of lead is much closer to what I thought normally occurred:

David Clerk, the magazine’s publisher and the executive director of Les Editions Protégez-Vous, said that after consulting with Health Canada, the magazine hired an independent lab in Quebec to perform what he called a “total lead test” on 32 toys, including the Maxi blocks. Essentially, the process involves scraping off a sample of the toy’s plastic, dissolving it in acid and then analyzing the solution.

When the results were returned by a lab, which Mr. Clerk said he could not identify because of a confidentiality agreement, a yellow Maxi block was the only toy that exceeded the 600-parts-per-million limit for lead set by Canada and the United States. Blue and red Maxi blocks showed no lead at all.

For confirmation, the magazine tested a second yellow block. It contained 1,180 parts per million of lead, nearly double the initial result.

Harold Chizick, a spokesman for Mega Brands, said that the magazine had used an inappropriate test for this kind of toy. “We do not have a lead problem,” he said. “It is a misleading test to do on that part.”

I should mention here that perhaps my son does rarely put his toys in his mouth- he tends to build towers with this mega block set.  But because I purchased so many of these blocks, they’re all over our house- under the sofa, behind doors, under beds.  The smallest of my dogs, an orally-fixated Boston Terrier named Louie (named for my home state of Louisiana), loves to chew on these blocks.  While I’ve read that lead paint can be so dangerous around children because the paint flakes taste sweet, it just occurred to me that my dog might like chewing on some children’s toys for the same reason. 

Tomorrow we’re clearing the toys made in China out of our house; I’ve lost faith in the testing methods, and our ability to detect problems in a timely manner.  We’ll be the grinches of the south, filling up a trash bag with all the toys we’re taking away from my kid.  I haven’t decided what to do with the toys yet- it goes against everything I believe not to recycle or donate back to charity, but I don’t want to send potentially leaded toys back onto the market, into other unsuspecting homes, or into the landfill to leach heavy metals into our groundwater.

Next week we’ll attend a nearby arts and crafts fair, and we’ll look for locally made, sanded wooden toys.  They’re more of a challenge to find, but I know they’re available.