Investigative Report: U.S. ships unsafe products

Ten days ago, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced another in a series of well-publicized recalls of Chinese-made goods: children's art sets containing crayons, markers, pastels, pencils, water colors -- and lead -- distributed by Toys "R" Us.

"Consumers should immediately take the products away from children," warned a news release from the federal government's watchdog for thousands of household items. "The CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families."

But 13 months earlier, in July 2006, the CPSC, without a press release or corresponding media attention, authorized a Los Angeles company to export to Venezuela 16,520 art sets that violated the same CPSC standard protecting children from dangerous art supplies. The following month, the agency authorized a Miami company to export to Jamaica 5,184 sets of wax crayons that also violated the standard.

Though recalls coordinated by the CPSC of Chinese-made goods have made headlines recently, for decades the federal agency has allowed American-based companies to export products deemed unsafe here.

Those products can present an even greater danger in a country that has only a handful of government employees devoted to consumer protection, said R. David Pittle, a former acting CPSC chairman who spent 22 years as a senior vice president for Consumers Union.

"If the United States doesn't have very many inspectors, how many do you think there are in Honduras or Jamaica or Trinidad or Bulgaria?" Pittle asked.

Using the CPSC's database of exports of non-approved products and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act, The Bee found that between October 1993 and September 2006, the CPSC received 1,031 requests from companies to export products the agency had found unsafe for American consumers. The CPSC approved 991 of those requests, or 96 percent.

Agency spokesman Scott Wolfson said the CPSC is simply following export notification law "as Congress spelled it out for us." But CPSC Commissioner Thomas Moore strongly objected to the policy.

"Our agency, through our governing statues, cannot claim much moral superiority over the Chinese, or any other foreign country, when it comes to our own export policy," Moore said in a list of his legislative proposals submitted to Congress in July. "Our export policy is based on a desire to see U.S. manufacturers be able to compete in foreign countries in terms of price and marketability, not safety.

"... It is somewhat hypocritical of us to berate any other country for not requiring their manufacturers to abide by the myriad U.S. mandatory and voluntary product safety standards."

The CPSC database did not identify how many of the approved exports were products made outside the United States that simply were returned to their manufacturers and how many made here or elsewhere were actually exported for sale in other countries. The data also represent just a portion of all products violating CPSC standards exported from the United States to other countries.

Under current law, companies have to seek CPSC approval when they export products that violate mandatory standards or bans. But only about 13 percent of CPSC standards are mandatory.

The agency is under a congressional mandate to first pursue voluntary standards, which lack the force of law, and companies exporting products that violate voluntary standards are not required to notify CPSC before exporting.

The largest number of requests to the CPSC to export banned goods came from California companies, which accounted for about one-third, or 338, of the total during the period reviewed by The Bee. The vast majority of the California requests came from the Los Angeles area.

One Stop Customs Brokers of Los Angeles, the company that applied to ship the art materials to Venezuela for another Los Angeles company, Kico Toys, told The Bee that the materials had landed in California by mistake. Customs broker Randy Tang said officials with Kico Toys told him the art sets should have gone directly from China to Venezuela.

About the writer:

• The Bee's Russell Carollo can be reached at (916) 321-1178 or rcarollo@sacbee.com.