Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Thursday, October 4, 2007
I’m feeling betrayed on so many levels these days. When the spinach and the carrots were recalled due to contamination I starting thinking about all the things most of us do these days to make ourselves and our families, healthier and enriched mentally.
Now this latest recall comes up. If there isn’t a law now, we need to see that some new laws are written. I have links posted at the end of this article and I have assigned homework.
While I was reading the list of today’s recalled tainted toys and other items 2 things leaped off the page at me. First, some of the product recalled today have been on the market since March of 2005. These items were sold in book stores and gift stores. Second, why on earth has it taken more than 2 years to make the public aware.
The Baby Einstein Discover & Play Blocks and been in the mouths of babies and toddlers for 5 months now. Every mother, hopeful she may raise the next Einstein has thoughtfully provided an enriching toy for her child. A lead laced toy that after 5 months of being in the hands and mouth of her toddler, may very well have given her child a learning disability.
There are Alphabet and Math blocks, learning blocks and Activity learning carts that have been in the hands and mouths of toddlers for a gut wrenching 2 years. Long enough in fact to have gone into subsequent children’s hands.
It makes me sick to think about it.
Every now and again we hear a blip in the news about an illegal drug that had been manufactured, where is anyone’s guess, poisoning a number of users. As sad and tragic as something like that may be most of us can just let it pass and think ‘oh well they shouldn’t have been doing that anyway.’ Maybe we think, ‘they should have known what they were taking was made by some loaded, incompetent idiot in a basement somewhere,’ and we move on.
When young mother, and grandparents are buying toys they believe are to the developmental benefit of children and find they have, unknowingly put poison in their child’s hands the case needs to turn criminal.
I believe waiting up to 2 years to recall some of these items is criminal, and should be punishable by prison time. Waiting 5 months to recall these toys is criminal. Letting them into the hands of a child for any amount of time is unspeakable.
This is your homework assignment today:
First follow this link to see the list of items in the latest recall and send this link to anyone you know that may be affected by the recall.
Second write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Start the drums beating.
If you can’t write a letter to your editor (for some reason).
Send an email to your Representative in the U.S. you can find them at this link.
Canadian Members of Parliament: follow this link
Labels: China, Recall, Tainted, Toys, lead paint
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
More Poison Toys from China! Time People on This Side of the Pacific to do Some Real Time! PSMI Extra
Friday, September 21, 2007
In what is being billed as Mattel’s mea culpa for the unprecedented toy recalls over the past several months Mattel apologizes to China.
Nothing says, ‘I’m sorry please don’t stop making our products for a fraction of the cost it would take to make them anywhere but in China’, like a personalized apology.
There is no question China’s reputation of being a nation of pariah has been increasing almost daily; now Mattel wants to mend that perception by telling the world and China that the recent recalls are all their fault.
It’s said that fear has a recognizable scent. Is that the odor wafting out of Barbie’s Dream House?
Mattel is now claiming the majority of toys recalled were in fact recalled as a result of poor Mattel engineering, and that only a small percentage of the recall involved banned lead-based paint.
80% of children’s toys are manufactured in China equaling a mind blowing 7.5 BILLION dollars worth of products. We’ve held the opinion that regardless of what was going on in China, Mattel, as other toy companies, own the responsibility for producing safe toys.
Mattel has announced plans to upgrade its safety system?
Here is a bulletin Mattel!
The time to upgrade your safety standards is:
frequently and prior to one child being harmed while engaged in the act of play!
Don’t wait until your stock values fall. Companies making anything that comes in contact with our most valuable, precious and helpless children owe those children and their wallet carrying parents a reasonable expectation of safety.
When companies are charging obscene prices for their goods, when they are making obscene profits they need to go overboard to make their products safe. These companies spend obscene amounts of money to advertise and bend the minds of their ‘target’ consumers.
It is time that consumers ‘target’ these purveyors of hazards and tell them we have had enough! Tell the makers of Polly Pocket to stay out of your pocket until they can prove they have changed their bad practices.
Contact Mattel: http://service.mattel.com/us/contactus.aspx
Labels: China, Mattel, Tainted, Toys
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Mattel Seeks to Pull Their Moo Shu Pork From the Wok!
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Yes, one more bit of bad news when it comes to your babies today. Now it turns out there is lead in certain baby bibs.
Lead bibs would, of course, makes sense with all the gamma rays and what not contained in strained peas and apple sauce. This bib thing really may be the straw that breaks the camels back. Not every kid puts toys in their mouths, not every kid stuffs things up their noses, but unlike the lead paint issue, and the inhaling of magnets: Every baby spits food out…therefore the bib.
Feeding a baby is all about attrition. Who will last the longest, the spooner or the spoonee. Younger babies may be amateurs when it comes to eating solid foods, but they are professionals when it comes to pushing that food right back out
Every mother has take the spoon and in a scrapping motion reclaimed food from babies face. Every mom too must admit to reclaiming food that has been rejected from a clean bib. My kids had dozens of bibs, some were even plastic so they could be wiped down instead of tossed in the laundry after every use. This is the long way of saying, if lead is being used in baby bibs, the babies that were being fed in those bibs most certainly have lead in them. Conversely all children that played with the most recently recalled toys will not have magnets in them.
Importing goods from China has become the same as feeding a baby. China is the spooner that keeps sending us products for which we do not have a taste. We spew those distasteful tainted products back.
The interesting portion of this serving is going to be seeing who gives up first. Will we at some point say enough is enough, we won’t accept dangerous, unwholesome products from anywhere any more? Or, will we be worn down, until ultimately years from now our sallow ed faces and blank stares sing the refrain of:
it was gluten from China wot dun ‘em in.
Gluten, toothpaste, tainted fish, lead based paint, jewelry, baby bibs, pet food….you fill in your own blanks.
We need to contact our domestic manufactures and let them know they appear to be engaging in practices that are UNACCEPTABLE. We will not continue to return or spew back their products, but that those products will remain on the shelves….unless and until they change their practices!
We work hard for our money, we love our families, and our pets…we’ve come to expect better, we deserve better…..let’s not lose the game of attrition.
Labels: China, Chinese Tooth paste. DEG, Tainted, lead paint
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Let China Off the Hook? Accepting Tainted Chinese Products is Our Own Fault.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Healthy and safety officials in the US are saying that parents shouldn’t trust Mattel to make safe toys for their children. That it is the parents responsibility to be sure products are safe! Just think about that statement for a moment. How in the world would anyone that wasn’t an engineer or a chemist be able to do that?
Of course a parent knows what pieces and parts can choke, pinch, or harm a child. But, there is no way on earth a parent can detect the hidden dangers in any product.
In a statement totally from left field the acting head of the Consumer Products Safety Commission in the US told viewers during a press conference that 9 million toys in the US, (18.5 million in total) recalled yesterday that were made in China, was only a small drop in the bucket. The vast majority of imports, when looking at the picture in totality, were safe. Oh really? This leaves the impression they are all being tested or monitored; clearly not so.
The very idea that the vast majority of imports from China, be they toys or any other product is ludicrous. How would anyone know? China knew.
Reuters is reporting today that China knew of the problems …”with magnets on toys as long ago as March”.
Lead paint has been banned from any type of use in the US since 1978. There is no presumable way the Chinese didn’t know the paint they were using was lead based.
The whole idea that any of these tainted products from China were honest mistakes would be comical were it not so serious. Deadly serious.
There are obviously no checks or balances when it comes to the poison being allowed to be shipped out of China.
Adding further insult CNN produced their in-house-doctor expert telling people if they think their child may have been exposed to lead they should have them tested. Okay…..and will Mattel be receiving the bill for that testing?
My opinion is, telling people not to depend on the safety of Mattel toys is the same as telling them not to depend on the safety of Gerber Baby Foods, or Heinz Baby.
Mattel is fact more responsible than the Chinese. It is their fiduciary responsibility to make sure the manufacturing of their products results in a safe product. They have shipped their production overseas to bulk up their profits, they need to spend some of those profits on inspection at the source.
Are we really to believe Mattel can’t afford to have one man on the ground at each manufacturing site that is in their pocket? Another ridiculous idea.
Are parents now being asked to preform their own lab tests on children’s products? What in the name of government are people paying the gate keepers of health and safety to do these days?
Confidence is the only currency any company has when it comes to gaining and keeping customers, one would think they would guard that confidence.
Are we to believe Mattel can’t or won’t afford a ’standard’ steward at manufacturing plants no matter where they are located? INCREDULOUS.
In light of China’s documented inability to produce safe products the public needs to start demanding truth in labeling, starting first with ‘China Free’ labels.
A company in Utah, food for Health International thinks so too. They have plans to start putting stickers on their products saying “China-Free”.
It has become nearly impossible to determine what portion of ingredients in any one product originate in China. International trade be damned. I’m fed up with being fed the party line.
“China-Free” stickers are an idea whose time has come….come and gone… in fact it’s way overdue.
Contact Mattel, Inc. and tell them you are going to be “Mattel-Free”, AG Brands-Free, Fisher-Price-Free until and unless they can prove they are putting the safety of our children and grandchildren ahead of their greed.
http://service.mattel.com/us/contactus.aspx for toll free numbers to call
http://www.mattel.com/contact_us/ US email
Labels: China, Chinese, Mattel, Recall, Tainted, imports, lead paint
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
China-Free, Mattel-Free: It’s time to put our ‘collective’ foot down!
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
China has one million food-processing plants give or take a few thousand; whose counting anyway?
Apparently China is counting. The ‘State Administration for Industry and Commerce’, a Chinese regulatory agency said 152,000, yes that’s one hundred fifty-two thousand, food plants and retailers were shut down last year due to unsanitary and substandard food being sold.
Now 180 more factories have been closed. They haven’t been closed due to employees failing to wash up after lavatory visits, they haven’t been closed because hairs were falling out of the nets into the potato salad. No, nothing that benign; Nothing that innocent.
These factories were purposfully, with forethought, contaminating their foods and products. Toss in some malice sprinkled with forethought and we, in the west, call that a felony. Using things like formaldehyde to heft up a product, keep it from spoiling, or any other reason seems far from a malice free act. Even an illiterate should be able to reason things like anti-freeze, formaldehyde are poisons. Most people never want to come in contact with formaldehyde until they’re dead and many don’t want to even then.
Sadly formaldehyde and anti-freeze are on the short list of poisons being pumped into a long list of Chinese products. Paraffin and industiral oil perhaps? How about mixing in a little ‘already used’ food. I’m unable to determine in which food group ‘recycled food, expired, or already used’ may fall.
So, 23,000 contaminated food products were seized by Chinese inpsectors and they aren’t finished yet. And, less than 1 percent of regulated imports from China were even inspected by the US FDA.
So what is our tally now? 152,180 Chinese factories closed since December. China says, most of these factories were small, having fewer than 10 employees, and they were ‘unlicensed’. If China is trying the quell the trepidation with which the west is eye-balling their products, calling a business with fewer than 10 employess a factory isn’t a step in the right direction. Around here that’s a ‘mom and pop’ business. That’s Mom, Pop their three kids and their spouses. Oh, and one cousin. See how that makes 9 employees? That’s fewer than 10 employees which in China constitutes a ‘factory’.
But, now comes the fun part of this equation; these small ‘factories’ make up 75% of China’s one million food-processing plants. Excuse me? Now here’s the real question. At some point did China lay down the figure of 1 million food-processing plants in order to impress the west or maybe intimidate? Were I wanting to become a player on the ‘world market’ it could be advantageous to inflate my presense, like a puffer fish, in order to appear a little larger to preditors. On the other hand, when the products I’m exporting start turning up with poison in them, it would behoove me to say that a group of tiny, unregulated, unlicensed ‘vendors’ is what ‘did-me-in’. Understandably and entirely not my fault.
China wanted to look like a formidable player on the world market. It looks as though the way to do that was for the government to spread it’s arms open wide and sweep in every available resourse, including the ‘mom and pop’ operations.
Maybe the ’sleeping giant’ really has been asleep. Maybe the giant part is the consumer. Maybe we underestimated China’s consumer goods manufacturing prowess. Maybe we saw millions of tanks, and hundreds of millions of woven Chinese Finger Traps and mistook that for commercial expertise.
If Friday’s news about factory closures’ was meant to quell the rising fears concerning Chinese Imports…it didn’t work on me.
Labels: China, Chinese, Poison, Tainted, exports, imports
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
More Tainted Chinese Products,with Fewer ‘Factories’ Operating
