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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.
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: If overseas manufacturers can get away with selling lead-filled products in the U.S., should parents and the general public perform their own lead safety tests? Should Amazon begin testing products for lead on a daily basis, especially any that reach a certain sales volume threshold?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Allison McCabe
Director Retail Technology, enVista
Perry Kramer
Managing Partner, Retail Consulting Partners
Product quality is an issue for all marketplaces, including the rapidly growing Chinese-owned ones. At least with traditional retailers you know who you are buying from and have some peace of mind that their products have been through testing and quality control. I do not think it’s up to parents to test for lead or other chemicals, it’s up to retailers to abide by US standards, regulations, and laws.
How are parents supposed to test products for lead? (They can’t.) Sellers like Amazon should look askance at products from China and conduct their own independent testing. This problem just keeps happening.
Although it would be a great value-added service, it is hard to hold Amazon more responsible than any other retailer that is reselling products. It is reasonable and fair to enforce a stringent code of ethics on the suppliers selling on Amazon. Ideally Amazon would either have a long-term band or add a premium fee for auditing any supplier who is found supplying products containing lead.
When it comes to safety, there is no bar too high for testing standards regarding children’s products. Of course for those standards to be upheld, there must be substantial repercussions for attempting to bypass or disregard those measures on both the part of the manufacturer and the seller.
Having an open marketplace to connect sellers and buyers does not preclude Amazon from ensuring that the products sold are safe and comply with the laws of the country where they’re being sold. Clearly, there’s work to be done here by Amazon and others.
Lead. In products made for kids. In this day and age. Unbelievable. Sounds like Amazon or the FDA or somebody should be testing. But how about a lifetime ban from Amazon for any brand or manufacturer caught selling tainted product? That might give them a little incentive to do their own testing. And the right kind of product development to begin with.
On the surface, a simple problem to solve. There needs to be testing and accountability for those caught in violation. Unfortunately, not as easy as it sounds, based on these ongoing situations.
Well…lead is a problem and if Amazon does nothing I believe there may be a bit of a legal exposure for them. A smart tort lawyer will go after a settlement, maybe or maybe not-but why risk the exposure?
AT&T is living this right now with the lead cable health problem and it will end up costing them a lot of money in my view.
I believe that in mature economies you will see more and more focus on what is in products and how they were made. That will be a key part of the “product story”. In a small way my consumer habits have already changed because I am trying to eliminate (almost impossible) sugar from my diet, which eliminates about 95% of the processed food I may have once purchased and enjoyed. I never did that before.
May it be so, Mark. but I can’t help but seriously doubt it.
What most consumers do not realize is that although Amazon is a direct seller that carries tons of their own inventory, it is also an infinite worldwide marketplace for third party sellers, which means that Amazon has limited systems in place for quality control.
Toy makers and distributors from anywhere in the world can have its products sold through the Amazon marketplace. – Db
Testing for lead and toxic chemicals in products happens at manufacturer level at the chains and big box stores shoppers frequent on a daily basis. These retailers are stringent about what product makes it to their sales floor. Amazon IS a flea market, so are other sites that sell cheap goods from China. Buying from one of these retailers is a crapshoot and a case of buyer beware.
If lead is back again it means it likely never completely left, and we are in need of better testing and stronger accountability from every retailer, online and off. It’s up to the retailer to abide by the laws and provide shoppers with peace of mind.
It took over 100 years to do something about tobacco, about lead in paint and about aesbestos. There is no innocence in manufacturing as in “we didn’t know.” Greed and making money regardless of collateral damage is the transcendent value in our world today.
And it’s a mistake to assume that the government is looking after us with out-of-date “standards” for things like water quality and what makes a children’s toy safe. They, for the most part, are decades out of date and unlikely to change any day soon. There is complicity from all quarters in this assault on wellness and safety. For goodness sakes, nano-plastics and PFAS forever chemicals are evident even in human embryos. Multiply that many times for all of us reading Retailwire.
And as adults and children play with things wireless and get excited about 5G and soon 10G…let me give warning about the next scourge; electromagnetic radiation. Fifty percent of the population are known to have general or severe susceptability to this form of radiation. Europe has declared EMR as THE health hazard of the 21st century while we barely give any recognition to the issue. We – and Amazon – need a serious wake-up call!
As usual, well said my friend.
I’m in the children’s product space and our goods are sold on Amazon. Here’s the deal: First, Amazon asks the resellers of product to supply documentation, not the manufacturer. (Of course, our resellers do come ask us for the lab reports.) Second, the documentation requests come through randomly – they do not ask for paperwork on every item as it gets listed or as resellers offer up inventory. So I am not surprised at all that this continues to happen. Resellers could fake lab reports. A particular ASIN might go for years without ever seeing a test request. If Amazon switched around to getting lab reports from manufacturers and only allowing manufacturer-approved resellers to put inventory up for sale, that would help quite a bit, but they’ll never do that as it gives too much pricing and distribution power to small and midsize manufacturers. (That level of control is only allowed for vendors like Apple and Gucci…)
At the risk of sounding like an apologist, it might be nice to have a clearer picture of the scope of this problem – I doubt very much Amazon is selling “lead-FILLED” products, as we are likely talking about trace amounts (which of course is part of the problem as they aren’t particularly obvious). The author seems to take an absolutist approach – not a single “unsafe” product, anywhere, ever – which of course is his right….as long as the demand is made consistently of every retailer. About everything. Always.
Overseas manufacturers are “getting away with selling lead-filled products in the U.S.” – American manufacturers, resellers, etc. aren’t doing proper supervision on-the-ground in Asia. And, of course, everyone from the brander to the consumer wants cheap toys and that encourages cutting a lot of corners. And, that’s without addressing the challenge of counterfeits. Obviously parents are – generally speaking – not equipped to do accurate lead testing and I’m not sure Amazon could either, at least on a daily basis as indicated in the question.