Consumer Product Safety Commission
cmonforton | December 16, 2015You’ve probably seen on-line the grim photos showing a construction nail embedded in a person’s skull or hand. The culprit: nail guns. In particular, those with “contact actuation triggers.” An estimated 37,000 pneumatic nail-gun related injuries are treated in US emergency rooms every year, with slightly more than half being work-related. Nail guns are the leading cause of tool-related injuries in the US construction industry that result in hospitalization. As researchers who study nail gun safety wrote in the March 2015 issue of Professional Safety:
“Before pneumatic nail guns were…
cmonforton | February 12, 2015Last month, my circa 1980 hand-held hair dryer finally gave out. It was a Christmas present during my first year in college. The motor on the cream-colored Conair didn’t exactly fail, but I had to jiggle the electrical cord in just the right way or it wouldn’t turn on. I bought a new one, and my old one went into the garbage can. But after reading a paper in the latest issue of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH), I sort of wish I’d kept it. I knew I had an appliance relic on my hands, but now I’m curious to know whether it contained asbestos.
James…
egrossman | July 14, 2014What do these places have in common: Camp Lejeune in North Carolina; Mountain View, California, where Google headquarters are located; Endicott, NY – the birthplace of IBM; and 389 Superfund sites in at least 48 states plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands? All are contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), a volatile organic compound classified as a carcinogen that’s been widely used as a solvent and degreaser in large-scale industrial processes, small commercial shops and in some products used by individual consumers. On June 25th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its…
egrossman | March 11, 2014“The United States is facing an industrial chemical safety crisis,” Chemical Safety Board Chairperson Rafael Moure-Eraso told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on March 6th. He spoke at hearing held to discuss President Obama’s August 2013 Executive Order on chemical facility safety, which Obama issued following the catastrophic incidents at the West, Texas fertilizer plant and Louisiana petrochemical facilities. In the wake of the Freedom Industries chemical release in West Virginia, improving the nation’s chemical safety has taken on a new urgency. Yet while the Senate…
dblum | June 17, 2010 This is a story about 13.4 million promotional drinking glasses. Really cute colorful glasses produced for McDonalds in a tie-in for the current hit movie, Shrek Forever After. All of said glasses recalled by said McDonalds (in both the U.S. and Canada) after it turned out that the pigments used to create those images contained the toxic metal cadmium.
Oops, you might say. Because cadmium has been known as a bad actor for close on 200 years. Almost since it was discovered, in fact. So before we return to the poisoned Shrek glasses, let's spend a little time on that history - and…
sb admin | September 2, 2009The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (a partnership between the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Pew Charitable Trusts) compiles an inventory of nanotech-enabled consumer products, and they recently announced that they've identified 1,000 nano products.
Given the many concerns about effects of nanoparticles on workers' health, human tissues, and even our water supply, it's too soon to be using nanoparticles widely - but that's exactly what's already happened.
Although nanotechnologies have many potentially valuable applications (like improving monitoring and…
sb admin | August 21, 2009Three physicians and researchers from the Capital University of Medical Sciences (Beijing, China) have published a case report in the European Respiratory Journal describing severe lung disease in seven female workers employed at a shop where they applied polyacrylic coatings to polystyrene boards. The lung disease is just one part of the story---two of the women died (ages 19 and 29)---the other part is that pathology samples from the workers' lungs identified 30 nm (nanometer) in diameter particles. Further investigation found that the coatings used by the workers contained nano…
sb admin | May 1, 2009University of Maryland Law Professor Rena Steinzor called for fundamental changes to the role of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in federal regulatory review, at a House Committee hearing held on April 30. The Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology has been examining OIRA's functions and responsibilities, with the chairman stating:
"...Though rarely in the headlines, OIRA has, in the years since its creation under President Reagan, quietly become the most powerful regulatory office in the Federal government."…
sb admin | February 10, 2009Cross-posted from CPR Blog, by Rena Steinzor
Weâve written a great deal about Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor who is expected to get the nod to be the âregulatory czarâ for the Obama Administration.  In a nutshell, our concern is that Sunstein will stifle the efforts of health, safety, and environmental protection agencies to struggle to their feet after eight long years of evisceration by the Bush Administrationâs regulatory czars, John Graham, and his protégé, Susan Dudley.
But, we got to thinking. Just because the 30-year tradition of regulatory czars is to kill regulations…
sb admin | January 28, 2009By Jerome Paulson
Starting on February 10th, companies won't be able to sell children's products that contain more than 600 parts per million total lead. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recently clarified the requirements under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and put to rest the fear that thrift stores and consignment stores would have to go through lead certification processes for all of the many products they sell. But some consumers and businesses are still concerned that the costs of third-party lead testing will be too high for small toymakers, and have started a…
sb admin | November 11, 2008Members of the media are gravely enumerating all the challenging circumstances that President-Elect Obama faces (financial collapse, two wars, global climate disruption, etc), so itâs worth noting that this is also a tough time for product safety. Recent problems with lead in childrenâs toys, contaminated food, and tainted drugs have demonstrated how many holes exist in our systems for ensuring product safety, and Chinaâs melamine problem highlights how problematic it can be to rely on countries whose safety mechanisms are even weaker.
Hereâs a quick review of where things stand:
The…
sb admin | September 2, 2008Last month, Congress passed and the President signed major legislation strengthening the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Washington Postâs Annys Shin described it this way:
The measure ⦠represents the most significant expansion of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) since it was created in 1973. It also marks a fundamental shift in the federal government's approach to protecting consumers from dangerous products: transforming a reactive stance to a preventive one by dealing with hazards before goods reach the marketplace, including products manufactured overseas.
And just…
sb admin | April 8, 2008The winners of the 92nd annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and reporting on veteransâ care and on drug and product safety scored top honors in the journalism category:
The Public Service prize went âto the Washington Post for the work of Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille in exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.â The Postâs Walter Reed and Beyond website includes the original stories and slideshows, as well as reporting on the federal response.
The…
sb admin | March 10, 2008On Thursday, the Senate approved legislation that will boost funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, increase the agencyâs enforcement power, and effectively ban lead in all childrenâs products. The House bill passed in December contained similar provisions, although that chamber raised the maximum fine for companies that fail to report product hazards immediately to only $10 million, compared to a Senate cap of $20 million. Compared to the current maximum of $1.8 million, though, those are both big improvements.
There are some ways in which the Senate bill is markedly tougher…
sb admin | February 20, 2008As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but thatâs not the whole story. Itâs also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply arenât strong enough.
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems weâre facing and offer…
sb admin | February 7, 2008Weâve written before about how the Consumer Product Safety Commission lacks both the authority and the will to come down hard on companies that keep their unsafe products on the market. Now, Public Citizen has tallied up the time that elapsed between the dates when the CPSC learned of several dangerous products and the dates when the agency issued warnings about the hazards. Their results will probably worry anyone whoâs purchased a coffee maker, bicycle, or infant swing over the past few years.
Public Citizen studied CPSC settlements published in the Federal Register, a total of 46 cases…
sb admin | January 27, 2008UPDATED BELOW
Annys Shin of the Washington Post has reported that Dr. Gail Charnley, a well-known corporate product defense expert, is the White Houseâs leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Weâve written extensively here about this beleaguered agency. Finally, after the nation watched helplessly at the recall of millions of lead-contaminated toys, President Bush has evidently decided to replace current Chairman Nancy Nord with someone more competent to safeguard the interests of manufacturers of dangerous products.
The Post article lists a few…
sb admin | January 10, 2008Congress left town last month without passing legislation that would overhaul the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose weakness has been apparent in recent problems with toys containing lead, dangerous magnets, and a chemical that metabolizes into the so-called date rape drug gamma hydroxy butyrate. They did pass a ban on industry-sponsored travel (after the Washington Post reported on trips for CPSC officials sponsored by the toy industry), and they gave the CPSC an $80 million budget for the next fiscal year, which represents the agencyâs biggest budget increase in 30 years.
The…
sb admin | January 4, 2008In all the rigmarole of the holiday season, you might not have heard about the consumer safety hazard associated with Christmas lights (or noticed the fine print warnings on their boxes).
Itâs no secret that lead is used in light stringsâ polyvinyl chloride insulation to prevent deterioration and to guard against fire. But what is a new development this year is the revelation that handling the wiring while you âdeck the hallsâ may result in significant lead exposure.
According to CNN, laboratory tests using the Consumer Product Safety Commissionâs wipe test for lead in polyvinyl chloride…
sb admin | December 5, 2007Once again, toys are turning up with high lead levels â and, once again, it was an advocacy group, rather than the Consumer Product Safety Commission, that did the tests and broke the news.
The nonprofit Ecology Center, working with other groups across the country, bought and tested 1,268 childrenâs products, and found that 35 percent of them contained lead. The results from their tests â which also looked for polyvinyl chloride, cadmium, and arsenic â are available at www.healthytoys.org.
Tracey Easthope, Director of the Centerâs Environmental Health Project, explains why they took on the…