Under scrutiny: Safety standards for baby & child products

I recently spent several days at a series of meetings (23 in all) held by ASTM-International on safety standards for juvenile products. From cradles to cribs, voluntary standards for juvenile products are developed by ASTM committees made up mostly of manufacturers, testing laboratories, government agencies, and consumer groups.

As you can imagine, consumer organizations--Consumers Union, Kids in Danger, the Consumer Federation of America, and Keeping Babies Safe, among others--are outnumbered by manufacturing groups, whose members often make it difficult to develop the strongest safety standards. Still, we put up a good fight.

Developing standards can be an exacting and tedious process. Engineers (like me) can get bogged down in long discussions about proper sentence structure or converting metric to English measurement units. Sometimes that delays us from tackling the more substantive issues, like how to improve a product so it doesn’t hurt kids. The juvenile-products committees meet only twice a year, so working out a new standard can take years. When a standard is finally passed, manufacturers can still choose not to follow it--remember, it’s voluntary.

Read the rest of this post, from Consumers Union's senior director of product safety and technical public policy Don Mays, on our Safety blog.

Comments

[Kids]

Safety standards are very important for children products.
Thanks for posting information.

Julia