One location my family likes to patronize is a charity shop for the local animal shelter. There, like so many other charity stores, people can donate items to be sold in order to benefit the charity that’s selling the product. But the Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act threatens such stores.
The CPSIA, seeking to increase protection against lead and phthalates in products for children, actually requires anyone reselling the same products to do testing on them. Quite a nightmare for your local charity shop. Kare11 reports:
Moronic legislation that steps over the line. Congress hastily passed the law in response to widespread recalls of toys that contained lead and posed threats to children. Instead of taking the time to do something that would be both pragmatic and would address the issue, we got this bunk.
Ed Morrissey:
Instead, it passed a sledgehammer that threatens not just to keep poor people from buying inexpensive clothing for their children and putting independent boutique clothiers out of business, but also accelerate use of landfills for clothes that are perfectly safe to wear. It’s absurd.
I wonder who will save “the children” from starvation or from the elements when their parents can no longer afford food and clothing thanks to their “good intentions”.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
7. January 2009 at 8:52 pm
I’ve blogged about this, too. It’s not just thrift shops. Used children’s books are at risk as well. SEcond hand book stores may have to dump their inventory of children’s books.
Small cottage businesses, crafters who make children’s toys or shoes (see Etsy for the sorts of things I’m talking about) are definitely at risk.
It’s also important to understand that this is NOT about protecting the rights of thrift shops or crafters to sell toys and shoes with phthalates or lead and make our kids sick- all these items are presumed to be lead or phthalate based unless proven otherwise. It’s not that these items HAVE lead or phthalates- it’s that they have not been *certified* lead-free.
Sellers are required to get third party testing of each item and each individual component (rivets, buttons, beads, which must have different testing for each color, and possibly for each batch).
This can run to thousands of dollars for just a few items, effectively putting small businesses and people who sell things from their home via Etsy out of business. If you sell five dollar bids you cannot afford to get separate testing for the ties, the lining, the embroidery thread, the main material, for each small artisan batch of bibs you make.
Get this- currently? According to one crafter I read on the Etsy forum, almost all the testing facilities are in China.
According to the Commission (which consists of two people), these rules will also be applied retroactively to inventory crafters and others already have in stock.
It’s a horrible mess.