CPSIA Blogging Day – Save Handmade!

See these skirts?

{via Kissing Kumquats}

I bought them last week for Lu on Etsy for a couple of fun Spring days. Aren’t they freaking adorable? And very, very well priced.

Well, if a certain law goes in to effect next week, it will be illegal for the wonderful maker of these skirts to sell them. Why? Well, it’s a complicated issue, but here’s the gist of it:

In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public’s trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.

For small toymakers and manufacturers of children’s products, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.

Basically, a law with good intentions will make it illegal for small businesses in the U.S. to make anything handmade for children (not just toys) unless it complies with all of the above, which is nearly impossible for any small company. So instead of a great, handmade toy, your child can play with something plastic from Mattel. Instead of my daughter wearing these awesome skirts, she’ll be wearing something stitched up by an 8-year-old kid in a factory in Korea. Instead of reading books in local libraries, these books will be thrown in the garbage.

Go here, learn more and sign a petition if you’d like. I’ll be over at Etsy, buying everything I see before the law goes in to effect (February 10th, people!). Don’t tell Trent.