CPSC Reform Act--Resumed

Floor Speech

CPSC REFORM ACT--RESUMED -- (Senate - March 06, 2008)

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I am here today to talk about the bill that is pending on the floor. I am very pleased this bill is advancing, the Consumer Product Safety Commission bill, that involves so many important provisions.

But in my State, I will tell you this: We are very focused on the provision dealing with the toxic toys. I can tell you, after being in the Senate for only a year, it is truly an inspiration to see we were able to get a bill through our committee--thanks to the leadership of Senator Pryor and Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens--and get it to the floor.

The reason it is so important in our State is we had a little boy who died, a 4-year-old boy who swallowed a charm that was given to him with a pair of tennis shoes. He did not die from choking on the charm. He did not die from his airway being blocked. He died when the lead went into his bloodstream day after day after day. When that charm was tested, it was 99 percent lead. It was from China. His own blood, when he died, had three times the normal amount of lead.

It is a very sad story. But it is some solace to the people in our State that after only being here a year, and as a member of the Commerce Committee, I was able to work to make sure we have a Federal lead standard in this bill. It is rewarding, indeed, that it looks like today we may be completing our work.

I say to the Presiding Officer, I know you have seen this in Ohio. We have seen toy after toy recalled in this country. In fact, 29 million toys--look at this chart--were recalled in 2007 alone. Look at this: This is a calendar of the various dates with the various toys that were recalled in the year 2007 and into January and February of 2008.

We saw the Thomas the Trains that were recalled. We saw Dora the Explorer, we saw SpongeBob SquarePants being recalled--these toys that are so near and dear to people's hearts. You get a sense of it with the calendar, but this list is an actual documentation of all the toys that have been recalled in the last year and 3 months.

You have things such as necklaces, Rachael Rose Kidz rings. You have the trains, the Cub Scout badges, ugly teeth that you put in your mouth for Halloween, of course, the Aqua Dots that morphed into the date rape drug. You can go on and on and on.

I think it is stunning at this time in our history we would still have something such as this happening. I think many people thought in the 1970s--when we got our act together in this country about consumer protection and we strengthened the laws and we realized kids were dying from problems, with everything from cribs to dangerous toys, to flammable pajamas--this country got its act together.

Well, look what happened instead. We have seen a record number of imports coming in from other countries that do not have the safety standards we do.

This was brought home to us--and it was more than toy recalls and numbers--when a few days ago Senator Pryor and I met with the families of two children who almost died from toxic toys.

The first is Jacob--or Jack, as his family knows him. His mother Shelby came from Arkansas to the Capitol. She told her story in a way I will never do justice to--a very touching story--where she talked about the fear she had on this day. It was a normal day. Any parent can imagine this. You start out. You are in the kitchen. It was October 30, 2007. Jack was 20 months old at the time.

What happened was, his older sister had these Aqua Dots that you put in water and they transform into an animal or something like that. He swallowed some of them. All of a sudden, this little boy was standing there, throwing up and stumbling around. She immediately took him to Arkansas Children's Hospital, where he was treated by a doctor, Dr. Jaeger.

Suddenly, this little boy, Jacob--Jack--went into a coma. They had no idea what caused it. Kids swallow things, as we know, all the time. They will swallow a penny. They will swallow something. It is not a good thing, but they do not immediately go into a coma. He was in a coma for about 6 hours. They thought they were going to lose him because no one could figure out what happened.

Well, she said, just like this, he came out of the coma and he was fine. The doctor was in shock. The doctor said if he had not been there, he would not have even believed it had happened.

So they got him home. No one figured out what happened. She got on the Web site herself--the mom did--trying to figure out what was in Aqua Dots. She called the company. Everyone was trying to figure it out.

Finally, they did some testing in the next few days, and they found out the coating that was put on these particular Aqua Dots metabolized into a chemical compound known as the date rape drug. As a former prosecutor, I can tell you we have handled cases involving date rape drugs. This is not a little thing. These are used to knock people out for hours so crimes can occur, and they take vulnerable victims and try to put them to sleep. That is what happened with these Aqua Dots.

These simple little toys--that are supposed to be pet pals--morphed into a date rape drug right in this little boy's stomach. So she came and told us this story.

On November 7, Spin Master--the company that makes Aqua Dots--recalled the product. The chemical that is in these little beads could cause children--they figured out--to become comatose, develop respiratory depression or have seizures.

Luckily, this little boy survived. This is what we were dealing with.

Then, another family came and talked to Senator Pryor and me. This is Colton, also a little boy. He is a little older than Jacob. Their family lives in Oregon. The mom told us this story:

In 2003, when Colton was only 4 years old, he swallowed a little trinket they had gotten out of a gumball machine. It was later determined--they couldn't figure out why he was so sick. He was having trouble. He was not himself. They took him to the doctor. They figured out he swallowed this lead. They got the toy out of him, but they figured out later that this toy was 39 percent lead. His lead levels--this little boy, Colton--at the time were considered fatal, but he survived. This led, actually, to the recall of 150 million pieces of gumball machine jewelry.

Now, this is not that different from the story I told you about Jarnell. This mom told me when we met earlier in the week that when she heard about Jarnell, it all came back to her. She spent the last 2 years trying to be an advocate, all by herself--Colton's mom--to get something done on this, and then imagine how she felt when she read that this little boy, Jarnell, in Indianapolis had died from exactly the same kind of charm, these lead charms; something like that went into his system. The one Jarnell had was 99 percent lead. Luckily for little Colton, the piece he had was only 39 percent lead. But now, even today, Colton's lead levels, even when he is much older, are at 17. They are not where they should be, and they are constantly on alert for what might go wrong. If he has a growth spurt or if he breaks his bones, his lead levels will increase, and they don't know the effect that will have. We all know it is very dangerous, the brain damage in children and other things it does.

The other thing about these charms--and we are very focused on little kids swallowing them, but the other thing about them is that necklaces can also affect teenage girls because they put these necklaces on, and then they are sitting in class or they are with their friends, and they chew on them. I have seen little girls actually do this--teenage girls. They are cheaper jewelry charms, and they start to chew on them. Well, in January 2007, 114,000 necklaces were recalled because the pendants contained high levels of lead, these kinds of pendants that continue to be recalled throughout this year.

Another example: In February of 2007, almost 300,000 Rachael Rose rings, which were worn by very young kids who wanted to try on a ring and have a ring on, were recalled.

In June of 2007, we had the Thomas & Friends, which was the first batch of 1.5 million recalls. This story is one that is worth noting. The Presiding Officer will be interested in this one.

These were toys that were manufactured and painted in China. The RC2 Company, when they found out about it, called for a recall. They were very embarrassed about the safety record. They appropriately apologized to their customers, saying they would make every effort to ensure this wouldn't happen again, and to help encourage customer loyalty and to prompt customers to return the trains, they actually said: You know what, we will give you a bonus gift. We are going to replace the toys, and we will send you a bonus gift if you send in your toys that have been recalled. So all of these parents sent in their recalled toys. As you can imagine, they are trying to figure out which toy is recalled and which isn't. Is it the caboose or the boxcar? They end up sending it back to get this bonus gift. Guess what. This bonus gift backfired in a big way. It was discovered that 2,000 of these bonus gift items contained lead paint levels 4 times higher than legally allowed, leaving the parents of these toddlers to deal with what we call the double recall.

Then, in August 2007, almost 1 million Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer toys were recalled by Fisher-Price. In October 2007, 1,600,000 Cub Scout badges were recalled for extremely high lead levels. Just this last Halloween, just a few days before Halloween, 43,000 Ugly Teeth toys were recalled that kids put in their mouths for Halloween.

This is just what I call the ``greatest hit list.'' There were over 9 million toys recalled by hundreds of different companies in 2007, with a total of 27 million toys recalled.

Yet we have known about this danger for 30 years. That is what is so shocking about this. As we advance in this country with technology, with BlackBerrys and cell phones, it is unbelievable that we would be stepping back. The science is clear. It is an undisputed fact that lead poisons children. It should not have taken us this long to take lead out of the hands of our children, out of their mouths.

It is the Consumer Product Safety Commission's job to do this. When they started seeing all of these imports coming in, they should have done something. They should have come to Congress and said: We think we see a problem here. We are going to need more people. We are going to need more toy inspectors. It was Congress that had to take the lead to get this moving. The burden should not fall on parents or kids to tell if a toy train is coated with lead paint. Who is going to be able to figure that out? You figure that if you buy a toy from a reputable store, it is going to be OK. I think it is shocking for most parents when they realize there has never been a mandatory ban on lead in kids' toys in this country--never. Until this legislation, there has never been a mandatory ban.

In response to a series of letters I wrote to Chairwoman Nord in August about the dangers of lead in children's products, the Chairwoman responded on September 11. In this letter, Chairwoman Nord acknowledged that:

The CPSC does not have the authority to ban lead in all children's products without considering exposures and risks on a product-by-product basis.

Chairwoman Nord went on to say that were the CPSC--the Consumer Product Safety Commission--to attempt banning lead in all children's products:

It would likely take several years and millions of dollars in staff and other resources.

This response makes it clear that Congress cannot wait for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to act. They have had years. They have known this was increasing, these imports and what was going on for years, and they didn't act. That is why we need this bill. According to them, to give them the benefit of the doubt, they didn't have the tools or the resources to do their job. Now, it would have been nice if they had come earlier than this year to act, but they didn't have the tools on the books. So that is what this bill is about.

To talk a little bit more about the specifics, this legislation effectively bans lead in all children's products by classifying lead as a banned hazardous substance under the Federal Hazardous Substance Act. This was a part of the bill that incorporates the bill we wrote out of our office. The reason I, of course, was so focused on this was because of the fact that this little boy died in our State.

The bill sets a ceiling for a trace level of allowable lead at .03 percent of the total weight of a part of children's products, or 300 parts per million. Some States across the country have put these in because of inaction by the Federal Government. Some are set at .04. California has .04 for toys and .02 for jewelry. We decided the best way to do this is to set it at .03 for the first year, a year after the bill takes effect, and then, actually within a few years, go down to .01 because the science supports that we should be able to get it down to .01 percent of the total weight of kids' toys for lead. The idea is that, in fact, as some of the pediatrician groups believe, we can do this and we can maybe go lower than that, to trace levels of lead, and we allow the Consumer Product Safety Commission to do a rulemaking so that if they would like, and the science supports it, they can actually go down to zero or go lower if they would like. But these are trace levels of lead that are actually more aggressive than you see in some of the States.

The legislation also sets an even lower threshold for paint. Under this bill, the allowable level of lead paint would drop immediately to 90 parts per million. This lower threshold is critical because science has shown that as children put products in their mouths, it is the painted coatings which are the most easily accessible to kids. Every parent of a toddler knows this to be true. On these lead-tainted Thomas trains, you can always see, on the ones I have seen that have been brought into my office by parents who are worried, those little teeth marks of kids who are chewing on these toys.

I will tell my colleagues that people say: Well, what is the Consumer Product Safety Commission doing now? They have a voluntary standard at .06. So the standard is higher. The key is that it is voluntary, so they have to call and negotiate with the companies if they want to do a recall. A lot of our retailers in Minnesota, including Target and Toys ``R'' Us, have been very frustrated by this because they are negotiating with the manufacturer, so it is not clear. They want to get the products off their shelves, but they haven't been recalled yet. So this makes it much simpler because it is a mandatory Federal lead standard.

The other part of the bill that came out of a bill we drafted and which is very important to me--and I think it comes from being a mom, and it is practical--is making it easier when there is a recall to be able to identify the toys.

Now, when I talk to my friends, they say: What am I supposed to do? I hear about this recall. I go to the Consumer Product Safety Commission Web site. I can't tell which caboose, which train. Is it the boxcars? Is it the caboose? Which brunette Barbie? Which blond Barbie?

Big surprise: They don't keep the packaging. I don't think anyone but my mother-in-law keeps packaging for toys, because she saves everything.

What our bill does is basically says the batch numbers, when practical, should be on the toys. They won't be on Pick-Up Sticks, obviously, but they can be on the foot of a Barbie or on the bottom of these little toys which actually say on the bottom ``caboose'' or ``boxcar,'' and there can be a batch number. So it will be easier for parents to identify which toy they can get out of their kid's box.

We also have put in this bill a requirement that the numbers be on the actual packaging. Even though parents will throw the packaging away, we think that is important because the mom-and-pop retail stores, the little retail stores, and also the Internet--people will still have the packaging. So Target, Toys ``R'' Us, and Wal-Mart are going to be able to put into their computer system when a toy is recalled immediately so you can't sell it through the line. That is not as easy for smaller stores. It may not be as easy for a little drugstore or grocery store and also certainly not easy for people buying on eBay or selling on eBay. So we also require that the batch numbers be on the packaging.

As we all know, the Consumer Product Safety Commission's last authorization expired in 1992, and its statutes have not been updated since 1990. That is why what Senator Pryor has done as the chair of the consumer subcommittee--and I am proud to be a member of that subcommittee and to have worked with him on this bill--is so significant.

You think about how the marketplace has changed in these 16 years and what we have seen in the growth for imports from countries that don't have our same standards. Yet, at the same time, the Commission is a shadow of its former self. Although the number of imports has tripled--tripled--in recent years and the number of recalls, as I noted earlier, has been increasing by the millions, the number of Commission staff and inspectors at the Consumer Product Safety Commission has dropped by more than half, falling from a high in 1980--as my colleagues can see right here--falling from a high of 978 to 393 today. Look at that change. Maybe that wouldn't have mattered if we suddenly had fewer toys in this country, maybe if we had a third of the imports coming in. In fact, we have seen a tripling of imports from countries that do not have the same safety standards as we do. In total, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has only about 100 field investigators and compliance personnel nationwide.

What this legislation does--and we already started, actually, back in December, where we gave the Consumer Product Safety Commission, through our omnibus budget bill, some funds to hire more inspectors--this legislation more than doubles the Consumer Product Safety Commission's budget so that they can get those toy inspectors on board.

This bill provides some needed help to increase the inspection, the research, and regulation staff. It puts 50 more staff at U.S. ports of entry in the next 2 years. Some were announced just yesterday as a result of the work of this Congress.

Not only does this bill give the necessary funding and staff to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but it gives the Commission the ability to enforce violations of consumer product safety laws. This bill finally makes it criminal--criminal--to sell recalled products.

We have seen too many headlines this year to sit around and think this problem is going to solve itself. As a Senator, I feel strongly that it is important to take this step to protect the safety of our children. When I think about that little 4-year-old boy's parents back in Minnesota and I think about the children all over this country who have been hurt and the parents who have lost sleep just trying to figure out if what they are doing is right or what are they going to buy their kids for Christmas or what are they going to do about this problem--they shouldn't be thinking about those things in this day and age. We can beef up this agency that has been languishing for years. We can put the rules in place and make it easier for them to do their jobs.

So this isn't just a matter of banning lead in children's toys. This bill is a matter of implementing consumer safety laws and regulations. It is a matter of protecting kids from more harmful products. It is a matter of helping parents to understand what to do when something has been recalled. It is a matter of keeping customers informed and safe when purchasing products in the United States. And it is a matter of bringing the CPSC back into the 21st century. As I said, all of the toys were overseen by a guy named Bob, with a back office full of toys. He would be dropping them to see what happened and what didn't. He is retired now.

We are moving into the next century. This is a matter of getting serious about consumer safety. We have to say Congress cares about the families in this country. People get mad about the Congress because it takes so long to get things done. This is a bread-and-butter bill, about helping families.

With the bipartisan help of our Senate colleagues, we can pass this meaningful bill that gives the CPSC the tools they need to do their job, and it also sets clear and unequivocal standards of what is safe and what is not in this country.

The current system has been broken by years of neglect, by an agency that hasn't told the truth about its problems, and by an administration that has closed its eyes to what has been going on. This Congress can fix this. The Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act represents some of the most sweeping reforms we have seen in 16 years for consumer safety.

The Wall Street Journal said:

The Consumer Product Safety Act is the most significant consumer safety legislation in a generation.

We can pass this legislation today, Madam President.

I yield the floor.

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AMENDMENT NO. 4130

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of the Nelson-Snowe-Klobuchar amendment to S. 2636. I commend the good work of my colleague, Senator Nelson, that we have done on the bill as a whole, with Senator Pryor's leadership. The three of us as members of the Consumer Subcommittee have worked together to make this as strong a bill as possible. I especially applaud Senator Nelson's efforts to make sure the strong third party testing requirements were included in this bill.

As we have seen over and over again in the past year with the issuance of each new recall, independent testing plays a critical role in ensuring that the products on our shores and in our stores are safe. So I commend Senator Nelson for his good work in making sure independent third party testing will now be done using a more systematic approach under the bill.

The amendment we are sponsoring that will be brought to the Senate floor today would further strengthen the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act by addressing very real dangers that infants and toddlers face with durable goods. To clarify, when you hear the words ``durable goods,'' what does than mean in a mom's or parent's or kid's life?

Well, durable goods are nursery products that are those products that no new parent can go without: cribs, car seats and strollers and high chairs, the most basic of all children's products.

Unfortunately, what we have seen in recent years, in this past year in particular, is that these nursery products are leading to the most severe and the greatest number of product-related injuries for children.

In 2007, 48 percent, almost half, of nursery product recalls were initiated because the use of the product has led to some type of child injury or even death.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an estimated 64,000 children, 64,000 children under the age of 5 were treated in emergency rooms across the country for injuries associated with nursery products in 2003, at a cost of $2.5 billion. That is $2.5 billion.

This figure has certainly risen over the last 5 years. And even more tragically, more than 50 children under the age of 5 have died since that time in incidents associated with nursery products.

I would like to take a moment and talk about one of the too many children who died tragically as a result of a defective crib, and that is 16-month-old Daniel Keysar. In May of 1998, little Danny was strangled to death in his licensed childcare facility when a Playskool Travel-Lite portable crib collapsed trapping his neck in the V of the rail.

Danny was the fifth child to die while sleeping in the Playskool Travel-Lite crib from 1990 to 1997. More than 1.5 million portable cribs with similar dangerous designs were manufactured. A total of 16 children have been killed by this type of crib. This is just a crib, a crib that you would put up in your house, and that many children have died in. And while these cribs were all eventually recalled, in 2007, we saw the largest recall of cribs in our Nation's history. You can see right here this is one of the more than 1 million cribs that were recalled last year; 1 million cribs recalled in 2007.

But these cribs never should have been brought to the market in the first place. It is not just cribs. Last year, when recalling the Evenflo Embrace infant car seat, the Consumer Product Safety Commission revealed that 160 infants were injured as a result of using this product. Many of these injuries were quite severe, ranging from skull fractures to concussions to lacerations.

Let me be clear: 160 babies were seriously hurt by a product that their parents bought for the sole intention of keeping them safe. That is why you get a car seat. I still remember. My daughter is 12, and I would never admit she had ever been in a car seat, but we all buy car seats to keep our kids safe. Just to think, for 160 households, it was the car seat that injured their baby. It is clear we must strengthen our safety standards and make them stronger for nursery products. Right now the safety of the Nation's nursery products depends on a system of voluntary standards. And while voluntary standards are a good first step, we have seen over and over again that they are not enough. The amendment Senators NELSON, SNOWE, and I are offering would direct the CPSC to evaluate and revamp these safety standards and give them the force of law. It is telling the CPSC, you have to do your job. Revamp these standards and make them better.

This amendment directs the CPSC to work with consumer groups, child product manufacturers and engineers and safety experts to examine and assess the effectiveness of our current system of voluntary safety standards for nursery products. We had voluntary guidelines for lead and look where that got us. The amendment then directs the CPSC to issue regulations aimed at reducing injuries and deaths from these kinds of nursery products.

This amendment is not controversial. Strengthening safety standards for nursery products is a winning proposition for everyone. This language was included in the House-passed bill by an overwhelming majority. It is my understanding that this amendment will be adopted in the manager's package. I thank Senators PRYOR and STEVENS for accepting this amendment.

I thank the Senate for their support for the amendment I offered with Senator Menendez to ban industry trade travel. Industries the Consumer Product Safety Commission is supposed to be regulating should not be paying for Consumer Product Safety Commission personnel to fly all around the world. I was glad we had bipartisan support for our amendment. We look forward to working on this bill through the day and getting this bill passed. It is incredibly important, the most sweeping consumer product safety reform in 16 years.

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