Toying with lead

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this summer you have heard about the many recalls involving toys made in China. It first appeared on my radar screen with the Thomas the Train lead paint recalls. We had a brief moment of panic in our household when it looked like James was going to have to leave our station, but thankfully our James is older and wasn’t affected by the recall. When I fished James from the train table drawer my four year old heavily questioned what I was doing with James. I gave him a sketchy explanation, and saw the look of terror on his face when I said James might need to leave our house for a while. He was ultimately relieved when I determined that the serial number on our James indicated that he was safe to continue residing in our train table drawer. Soon after the great James Scare (as it is now referred to in our household) we caught wind of a Mattel recall that had the potential to affect more toys in our house. Again we were lucky and our vast array of Diego toys was spared the fate of being shipped back to the manufacturer. However, recently we finally had to remove a lead-laden toy from the toy box. Sarge from the Disney Pixar Cars movie is still sitting in a kitchen drawer waiting for the postage paid envelope to take him back to Mattel.

I am not trying to make light of the seriousness of lead paint in children’s toys, but it isn’t something I lose sleep over at night. Thankfully Sarge was a rather recent addition to my four-year-old’s collection of cars, and he wasn’t played with all that much. I don’t feel the need to make my kids endure lead tests because for the most part they are past the putting toys in their mouths phase of childhood. I do have many friends who are losing sleep over the recent lead paint issues though. I’ve heard a few friends say things like “I don’t want to buy any toys that are made in China anymore.” As evident from articles like this, I would guess that my friends aren’t alone. Mattel is certainly aware of the public relations problems it faces as we move closer to the holiday toy buying season.

I won’t pretend to have the solution to this quagmire, although I will say that I cringe every time it is implied that if we simply add more government regulators we can solve problems like these. The problem with inspectors is that the more you have the fewer problems they catch…certainly the tenth inspector is well assured that the nine before him or her already caught any problems. The problems need to be fixed in design and within the manufacturers’ supply chains before they ever reach an inspection point. Obviously the lure to manufacture in a low cost country like China is strong and necessary for many low-margin high-volume retail producers. So how do they prevent problems like these from happening again? Please let us know what you think.