Why Is It Easy To Sell & Buy Toxic Lead Toys on Amazon?

Lead is an extremely toxic substance that should never be exposed to children. The CDC’s website explains all the health problems lead causes and declares that no safe levels should be tolerated for children, yet lead toys and products still run rampant in today's marketplace.

This past July, major news outlets like CNN reported that a stainless steel children’s cup from the brand Cupkin was identified as containing “levels of lead that exceed the federal lead content ban.” Approximately 346,000 of these cups are being recalled due to this newfound information. Cupkin, an American-based company, stated that their “manufacturing partner confirmed multiple times that absolutely no lead was used in any part of our production process,” according to FOX61 news.

These children’s cups were manufactured in China and sold on Cupkin’s website and Amazon between January 2018 and March 2023 before it was discovered that they contained high amounts of lead. Fortunately, the double-walled construction of these cups helps limit the amount of lead exposure for children.

This safety concern for lead toys is nothing new. According to the Seattle Times, "More than 15,000 people bought on Amazon school supplies and jewelry geared toward young children that contained dangerous levels of lead and cadmium in 2017 and 2018."

Concerned parents and authorities took action and voiced their concerns about these harmful products. Yet, “even after Amazon was notified of the illegal children’s products and said it had removed them, investigators found some of the same products again, as well as others that contained the metals at levels well beyond the legal maximum.”

In response, the Washington Attorney General announced that "Amazon must require third-party sellers of these products to provide certificates proving their safety and compliance with U.S. and Washington consumer-protection statutes." Importers and manufacturers are already supposed to have this certification, but they aren't typically required to show it to distributors or retailers.

Back to present-day 2023, not much has changed. As first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2019, “Amazon has increasingly evolved like a flea market. It exercises limited oversight over items listed by millions of third-party sellers, many of them anonymous, many in China, some offering scant information.” In this current 2023 retail environment, it’s easy to shop on Amazon for apparel and find clothing items that are nearly exact matches to something sold on Shein, a fast-fashion retailer that has also been called out for using toxic chemicals.

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has guidelines and procedures in place in cooperation with U.S. Customs to help prevent toxic products from being shipped into the U.S. But it seems many children’s toys are still being sold without any vetting from Amazon.

2019 also saw the state of Minnesota take action by banning off-brand spinning toys because they contained lead, according to the Star Tribune. The state’s officials began investigating possible sources after one child was found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. They found that knockoff toys from China that are based on the Beyblade franchise were the culprits.

The official Beyblade toys originate in Japan, and they are manufactured in Vietnam and licensed by Hasbro. Currently, in 2023, if a consumer searches for Beyblade toys on Amazon, hundreds of results appear for counterfeit products that could potentially contain lead.

This story is becoming all too common, and users of Reddit have shared similar experiences. One parent explained on the forums how their child accumulated high levels of lead in their blood from a seemingly innocent metal stethoscope toy they bought on Amazon.

The WSJ performed an investigation and found over 4,000 items for sale on Amazon that were declared unsafe by federal agencies. Of those items, “at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children.”

What’s even more unfortunate is that consumers cannot trust an Amazon seller’s description of an item. Insider reported about a mother who bought a toy instrument for her toddler that was advertised as being made of “high quality nontoxic material, safe and reliable for little children.” After a test was performed, the same toy was found to contain four times the legal limit of lead.