As you may recall, Mattel Toy Company, one of the world’s largest toy makers, has had its hands full in recent years what with the pesky problem of using paint chocked full of lead on more than 2 million toys manufactured overseas. (And lead, as we all know, makes paint shiny and all pretty. It can also cause irreversible brain damage if ingested by children, who tend to gnaw on just about anything given to them when they’re very young.)
So why is it that the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently granted Mattel special permission to use their own labs for testing instead of submitting their products to independent labs? And that’s not a rhetorical question.
According to Michael Green, executive director of the Center for Environmental Health, it’s ironic that the company that was a principal source of the problem of lead in children’s toys, and who had to pay a $2.3 million fine for violating the lead-paint ban enacted by the feds, gets to police itself. Could it have anything to do with the $1 million Mattel spent last year on lobbying in the halls of Congress? Hmmmm?
