Alphabet Soup of Promo Products Industry: CPSC, WBENC, ETS and QCA Webinar

Commissioners of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), old and new, are in print this week. While style and subject are in stark contrast, both are worth a read.

Former CPSC commissioner Nancy Nord, always counted on to be critical of her former employer, doesn't disappoint. Her article is on the testing burden of phthalates (a chemical very familiar to our industry that's long been used as a "plasticizers" to soften plastics) and what the CPSC is doing to lessen that burden on suppliers for third-party testing. Simply put, if the CPSC can gather data that a product can never contain phthalates then it wouldn't require testing. As Nord points out, that might work for simple products like fabrics or wood, where predicting the non-use of phthalates is intuitive. But predicting the future of plastics would be like saying the "Moon isn't made of green cheese." Nord's acerbic wit first contrasts what we know now about the planet, with the future likely makeup of the moon, and then again with the likelihood of an unscrupulous manufacturer EVER again using phthalates in the future. "You never know ...," and, of course, you can never prove a negative.