The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has made a new law banning the resale of products with lead if the products don't meet a certain safety level.
Initially intended to be aimed at new toys from big corporations, it now applies to all toys -- new or used -- sold by corporations, thrift stores, flea markets or your neighborhood yard sale.
Yup, that's right. Have a yard sale charging a few cents per item and you could be facing stiff fines -- $100,000 per infraction and up to $15 million for a related series of infractions.
The CPSC says the hefty fines are necessary and Consumer Reports agrees. "The former civil penalty limit of $1.87 million was too small to be an effective deterrent to large companies who flagrantly violated the law," said Don Mays, senior director of product safety planning at the publisher of Consumer Reports. "Mattel and its subsidiary Fisher-Price, for example, recently paid a $2.3 million penalty for importing about 2 million toys that violated the CPSC 30-year-old lead paint ban — that amounts to just over one dollar per toy."
The CPSC defends its meddling into things: "Many children have choked and died on small parts that have broken off or been incorporated into toys", said CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson.
Besides everyday people trying to make an extra buck off a yard sale, charities are going to be hard-hit. They don't have much of a margin of profit and now they have to spend extra money looking through toys that could get them fined out of business.
If you want to see the guidelines, you can find them here (PDF).
You can find the original article here.
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