In its investigation
In its investigation of the problem with the small magnets, Mattel found that the problem lay in the toys’ design, not their production. While the company routinely put its products through rigorous stress tests, it did not anticipate that if two or more high-powered magnets were ingested at once they could close off the intestines if they became attached inside a young child. Once it discovered this possibility, Mattel changed the design of the toy; in the newer versions the magnets were locked into the products so that a child could not break them free and accidentally ingest them. (The Consumers Union reported that one toddler had died and 12 children had been injured as a result of swallowing magnets, but did not say if Mattel toys, in particular, had caused these injuries.)
In the United States, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) had responsi- bility for protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury and death from more than 15,000 types of consumer products, including children’s toys. The commis- sion’s mandate included developing uniform safety standards for various products and, if necessary, issuing a voluntary recall of unsafe products. Some observers believed that the CPSC was underfunded and understaffed, relative to the breadth of its mission. In 2007, the commission had an annual budget of $62 million and employed around 400 people (down from a high of around 900), including about 15 investigators charged with visiting ports of entry to inspect imports and 100 charged with monitoring products on store shelves. According to the Consumers Union, an advocacy organization, Chinese products in 2007 accounted for two-thirds of the products the CPSC regulated and 60 per- cent of all product recalls, compared with 36 percent in 2000.
When Mattel announced its first recalls in August, the CPSC’s acting commissioner, Nancy A. Nord, attempted to reassure the public. She told the press that she was nego- tiating with representatives from the toy industry to conduct broader testing of imported toys and urged consumers not to overreact to news of the recalls. “In today’s environ- ment, it is easy to take recalls out of proportion. By no means is it the largest recall this agency has done, and it represents only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of toys that are sold in the United States every year.”5
In China, government standards required that paint intended for household or consumer product use contain no more than 90 parts of lead per million. (By compar- ison, U.S. regulations allowed up to 600 parts per million, although they banned the use of lead paint in toys entirely.) However, enforcement of the lead standard in China was lax, according to some observers. “There is a national standard on the lead level in toys,” said Chen Tao, sales manager for a toy factory in Shantou, in southern China, “but no one really enforces it. Factories can pick whatever paint they want.”6 Whether lead-based paint was used or not was generally left up to the customer. “It depends on the client’s requirements,” explained a manager at another Shantou manufacturer. “If the prices they offer make it impossible to use lead-free paint, we’ll tell them that we might have to use leaded paint. If they agree, we’ll use leaded paint. It totally depends on what the clients want.”7
