Change Is On The Way
TIA moves to codify future safety standards
By Cliff Annicelli -- Gifts and Dec, 10/1/2007 12:00:00 AM
Last month, Toy Industry Association president Carter Keithley testified before government panels examining the U.S. toy industry's actions both preceding and following this summer's recalls of lead-paint tainted toys.
In the wake of those recalls, TIA's board of directors on August 28 approved a program to reinforce toy testing and inspection programs. It stated publicly the U.S. toy industry's support for the concept of a federal requirement to make safety testing and inspection mandatory, and teamed TIA with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the private, non-profit organization that administers and coordinates the U.S. standardization and conformity assessment system, to develop and standardize procedures that will be used industry-wide to verify that products comply with U.S. safety standards, and to develop criteria to confirm and certify that test laboratories are qualified to conduct the prescribed testing. A TIA-created group that includes retailers and laboratories has been formed to help develop and implement the new program.
Playthings spoke with Keithley on September 19—the eve of a hearing with a key U.S. House of Representatives committee—to discuss how the industry's reaction to the situation was shaping up.
Playthings: How are the TIA-led initiatives with ANSI and the testing labs progressing?
CK: The whole process is being driven by ANSI. Since August, they've set up several subcommittees and I'd say that progress is being made. We think that we're closing whatever gaps might exist in our safety testing system by asking ANSI to implement those new sets of protocols. To close the final gap will be to ask for a federal requirement that the testing be done, because that's the only authority that could force testing to be done. The goal is to have an open architecture to the system. We don't want to have just one laboratory be the only authority, so ANSI will qualify the laboratories and then the laboratories, having achieved the credentials, will be doing the work pursuant to the prescribed protocols.
Playthings: What's the industry's confidence level in the laboratories' ability to handle the testing load? Are there concerns?
CK: In the short term, yes. In the short term, virtually all of our manufacturer members have told us that they're doing retesting, so the capacity of the labs to do all of this testing in a very short time frame to provide reassurances for this holiday season creates some degree of a capacity crunch. The good news out of that, I've been told by the labs, is that this comes at a time that's at the end of their normal toy testing cycle so this is a quiet time for them—they'll be the beneficiaries of new business. In the longer term, I don't believe there really is a capacity concern. For the most part, we believe that most, if not all, of our manufacturers have been doing this already. They may not have been doing it in a consistent way—we don't know if all of them have been doing it because it wasn't a requirement to do so—but we believe that most of them have been, because we have a good safety record for toys. As a consequence, I don't think new protocols will be a significant burden either on the toy industry or on the labs.
Playthings: What kind of impact will this whole situation have on the industry this holiday season? Is there anything cooking to try to persuade people about the 'goodness,' of the industry?
CK: I've avoided speculating what the impact will be on consumer attitudes or sales. Our response is: We're working hard to restore consumer confidence about the safety of toys. In the last couple of days, we retained a new public affairs consultant down in Washington to work with us to implement new consumer communications initiatives to provide the reassurances. But first, what we have to do is be careful that any reassurances that we provide have been verified and are factual. We would not want to be in the position to be making broad statements that we can't support or verify. We're working now on figuring out how we can get reliable information about toy safety.
Frankly, in knowing anecdotally that our manufacturers are doing so much of this retesting, we are probably going to be going back to them to give us verifiable information about their retesting activities. We're probably going to be reporting that out in a safety website-type format. We're pointing out to consumers that since all this retesting is being done and the retailers are going back to their vendors and saying, 'Provide us with assurances of the safety of your product,' that any product consumers find on the shelves this holiday season is going to be safe. This might wind up being the safest holiday season ever.
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