Baby Einstein Yellow Blocks of Toxins
No Likey!
This past weekend, we went to a kids’ fair put on by CPMC BabySteps (some sort of San Francisco health/welfare/social networking site that a local hospital is trying to launch).
One of the interesting things that they were doing at the fair was offering to test kids toys for contaminants. A local businessman, Jack Hanson of HMC Analytical, was donating his time and (very expensive) equipment to help local parents determine whether or not any of their kids’ toys were toxic.
We happened to bring along a couple of SFBaby’s toys to the fair, so we submitted them for testing. Most were okay, but the testing device (which I think was some sort of InnovX Systems XRF tester) flagged a yellow Baby Einstein block that we had recently acquired secondhand. The tester indicated that the vinyl ducky on the yellow block had lead levels of 4,000 ppm. The guy running the test said that the federal limit was 600 ppm, meaning that the block had 6X more lead than it should. Luckily, SFBaby had only had those blocks for a day and a half and she hadn’t gotten around to chewing on anything, so we weren’t worried about any health effects.
When he got home, SFDad was about to throw out the blocks, but on a whim, he checked out the situation on the Interwebs instead…
It turns out that the Baby Einstein Discover & Play Color Blocks (which are manufactured by Kids II in Georgia) had been subject to a recall late last year, but only for the blue block. It so happened that we only brought the yellow block with us to get tested, so we weren’t sure of the status of our own blue block…but we also checked out the Kids II website, and it specifically said that only the blue block in the set was subject to recall.
I decided to be a good citizen and to try to call Kids II to alert them to this additional possible problem, and after making a couple calls and getting transferred, I spoke with someone who eventually told me that the yellow block did not have problems. She claimed that the yellow block violated the Illinois state law for lead, which is why the company stopped selling it there, but that it did not exceed the federal limit for lead.
I told her that the block, as tested by our guy above, did seem to exceed the federal limit based on our test results. Unfortunately, she was very sure that the block was not a problem and she did not express any interest in doing any further testing with it. I tried asking if it were possible that they simply might not have seen this problem with the yellow block yet, but she claimed that they had tested all of the blocks and not found any problems. This statement was obviously nonsense (if they had tested all of their blocks, why did they ship a couple of months’ worth of lead-tainted blue blocks last year?) but she didn’t want to budge. Anyway, I politely declined her offer to send me a new yellow block for obvious reasons, and that was that.
After getting off the phone, I did more research and found that the situation is slightly more complicated than what the original tester (or what Kids II) had originally said. It turns out that there is no federal limit for lead in non-paint products. The blue block (which was recalled) had lead in some of the blue paint that was used, but since the yellow block had lead problems with its vinyl, it was not subject to recall. Granted, there may be differences in the way the lead can become dislodged and ingested or inhaled (it’s presumably much easier for paint to get into a kid’s system), but it seems odd that there is no federal limit whatsoever.
I also found that the Chicago Tribune wrote a story last year about the Baby Einstein yellow block, among others. The Kids II spokesperson was right in that Illinois has a fairly strict law related to lead contamination (they prescribe a 600 ppm limit across the board, not just for paint) which is why the yellow blocks were withdrawn from sale there.
However, the law is also nuanced in California (where SFBaby lives). Although I am unaware of specific limitations for lead in non-paint products, for a long time, proposition 65 requires manufacturers and retailers to post notices on items or areas that have chemicals that are known to cause harm to humans. It turns out that the California attorney general recently sued a number of toy companies, including Kids II, for selling products that contain lead without the required proposition 65 warning.
While none of the companies obviously wanted to have lead in their products, hopefully this will lead to better supply chain management practices that will help make toys safer for kids in the future!
As an aside, it still seems kind of dodgy for Kids II to have recalled only the blue block and not at least made a token attempt to acknowledge the lead content in the yellow block. (In fact, the first person I spoke with at Kids II had no idea whatsoever about any issues with the yellow block—I had to wait on hold for about five minutes until they tracked downs someone who could talk authoritatively about the issue.)
As a final note to all you parents out there: don’t forget to subscribe to the Consumer Products Safety Commission’s recall mailing list so that you can notified by email when things are recalled. The CPSC posted hundreds of recalls last year and it’s definitely hard to stay on top of them all without a notification service.
Anyway, it goes without saying that we are tossing all of our blocks from that Baby Einstein set!
Tags: attorney general, baby einstein, blocks, california proposition 65, federal, illinois, kids ii, lead, yellow