Toxic toys: You'd better watch out

So, with just 39 days to Christmas, have you started shopping for toys for the little ones on your Christmas list? As for me, the little naughty/nice ones on top of my list are all grown-ups already, and now, they’re asking for toys for the big boys or the big girls. Oh, well, they can always wish upon a Christmas star.

With the anticipated rise in toy sale, we can only wish for safe, non-toxic toys for children around the world amid alarming reports on unsafe toys flooding the market.

“Not all toy products that make it to the store shelves are child-friendly,” asserts Thony Dizon, coordinator of the EcoWaste Coalition’s Project Protect. “If we are not careful with our purchasing choices, it is likely we will be giving away toys that are not safe for children to play with.”

By unsafe toys, we mean playthings that can choke, cut, poke, strangulate, and expose young children to dangerous chemicals such as lead and mercury, which can damage the brain and the nervous system, and cause serious developmental delays and disorders. Now, this is certainly no kid stuff but a really serious concern.

Dizon seriously notes, “By being super diligent in demanding information about chemicals in products such as toys, we can make better choices and lessen children’s exposure to toxic chemicals that can badly affect their health and development. Consumer vigilance can push toy companies to finally shape up and put the health interests of young consumers ahead of corporate gains. Consumer demand for safe toys will hopefully compel manufacturers to disclose the chemical ingredients of their products through understandable and truthful labeling.

What should consumers watch out for?

As per Department of Health (DOH) Administrative Order 32, Series of 2007, all toy products on the market, whether imported or locally produced, should bear the following minimum information on the label or package: correct and registered trade or brand name; duly registered trademark; model or reference number; duly registered business name and address of the manufacturer and/or distributor; place, country, and date of manufacture; license to operate (LTO) number; warning and/or precautionary indications; instructions on toy’s usage, functions, features, and assembly; and  information on the specified age requirements.?

According to EcoWaste Coalition, consumers should specifically look for the LTO number, which is an indicator that the product is duly registered and compliant with the health and safety requirements of the Department of Health and the Philippine National Standard for Safety of Toys. “Since most toy labels would not reveal the chemical ingredients that make up a product, consumers could ask retailers to call the manufacturer, importer or distributor to get the essential information and refuse to buy the item  if the requested information is kept confidential,” Dizon stresses.

To drum up interest in this issue, EcoWaste is conducting awareness-raising activities in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It’s distributing colorful “Play Safe” poster co-published with the Food and Drug Administration and IPEN through public and private schools and other children’s hubs.

Last July, EcoWaste and IPEN tested 435 samples of children’s products bought from bargain, high-end, and ukay-ukay shops in Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Davao City. 

Using a device called X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer, here some shocking and unsettling revelations:

• Out of the 435 samples tested, 124 products (29 percent) contained at least one toxic metal above levels of concern such as antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury.

• Sixty-seven children’s products (15 percent) of the samples had lead levels above the US regulatory limit of 90 parts per million (ppm), with the top 10 products containing lead from 1,712 to 38,433 ppm.

• Eight children’s products were found laced with mercury, including four children’s cosmetic products containing 2.5 to 77 ppm of mercury, surpassing the country’s regulatory limit of 1 ppm for mercury in cosmetics.

They can’t stress this enough: Toys with lead can harm children’s brain development and their future. As in some wooden toys sold on the local market, which were found to contain high levels of lead, a neurotoxin.

“Our investigation confirms the disturbing quantities of lead in some painted wooden toys that can harm our children’s smaller and still growing brains and bodies instead of providing them with educational and recreational benefits,” says actress and health advocate Chin Chin Gutierrez. “We urge the authorities to take tough actions to rid the toys market of lead-tainted products, including recalling toys that are unfit and unsafe for children’s use.  We can and must prevent lead poisoning of our children from toys.”

Toys purchased in years or Christmases past still pose a risk to children’s health — and may even be doubly dangerous — as the paint tends to get chipped and loosen with time. EcoWaste purchased 11 imported and locally-produced wooden toys and sent them to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, USA for laboratory analysis using atomic absorption spectroscopy. Out of the 11, six were found to contain high levels of lead.

Under the US Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, the maximum allowable total lead content is 90 ppm for children’s products, including toys, with a caveat from health experts that there really is no safe ceiling for lead exposure in children.

You’d better watch out for these toys: 

• A colorful nautilus jigsaw puzzle made in the Philippines tested with the highest amounts of lead in 14 of its component parts with lead levels between 6,039 and 45,671 ppm.

• Other toy samples with parts loaded with lead include a wooden ornamental pin with one part containing up to 20,740 ppm lead.

• A tractor with wagon with lead concentrations between 2,055 and 11,764 ppm; another pin with two parts containing 4,101 and 4,888 ppm lead; a “learn to count” puzzle with lead levels up to 152 ppm; and a  barnyard puzzle with one part having 95 ppm lead.

Toxicologist Dr. Bessie Antonio of the East Avenue Medical Center identified a range of health problems linked with children’s exposure to lead, including damage to the brain and the nervous system, speech and language handicaps and other developmental delays, low intelligence quotient and other learning disabilities and disorders, attention deficit disorder and other behavioral problems, reduced bone and muscle growth, etc.

Project PROTECT (People Responding and Organizing against Toxic Chemical Threats), lists the following points that must be addressed by key government departments:

1) The Department of Environment and Natural Resources must issue a health-based chemical control order for the elimination of lead-added paints and articles to curb childhood exposure to lead.

2) The Department of Health must reinforce DOH Administrative Order 2007-0032 regulating the issuance of license to operate to companies that manufacture, import or distribute toys for the local market, to test toys for lead, and to initiate the recall of lead-contaminated toys.

3) The Department of Education must screen donations of toys and school supplies for DepEd’s K+12 Basic Education program, and also order the compulsory use of lead-free paints in school painting and re-painting activities

4)  The Department of Trade and Industry must review the Philippine National Standards (PNS) for toys to prohibit the production, importation, distribution, and sale of toys and other children’s articles loaded with lead and other chemicals of concern such as phthalates.

5) The Department of Finance through the Bureau of Customs must exert all measures to stop the entry of untested, unlabeled, and unregistered toys from overseas.

The government is also urged to ask toy manufacturers to examine the lead content of items they had sold in the past and include them in the recall if found to contain lead. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we repeat: As toys age, their paint wears off, exposing kids to lead. From 2007 to 2009, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 137 recall orders for over 10 million imported toys due to their high lead content.

Certainly, the safety and health of our precious children is something we shouldn’t play around with.

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