New Consumer Product Safety Information Act Could Ban Children From Libraries

From gently used clothing to handmade toys, we’ve raised our concerns about how the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) will negatively affect green families and businesses.

This law designed to protect our children is so poorly written, it will actually benefit big business and harm resale shops and natural toymakers.  As Stephen Lamar, executive vice president of the American Apparel and Footwear Association explained to the Redding Record Searchlight, “The law introduces an extraordinarily large number of testing requirements for products for which everyone knows there’s no lead.“  An exemption has been proposed for clothing and toys made from natural materials such as wood and wool, but what about library books? Yes, LIBRARY BOOKS!

Taking effect on February 10, 2009, the CPSIA will require all products for children under 12 be tested for lead, including books.  That means in order for a library to admit children under 12, they must test all of their children’s books or ban children from the library.

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According to Emily Sheketoff, associate executive director of the American Library Association, CPSIA will keep books or children out of libraries:

We are very busy trying to come up with a way to make it not apply to libraries.  Either they take all the children’s books off the shelves, or they ban children from the library.

Is this what our lawmakers intended when the overwhelmingly passed CPSIA? Not only will libraries be affected, but schools could be subjected to CPSIA regulations too. The CPSC has not released any ruling on whether libraries and schools will be exempt because they lend books and don’t sell them.

Image: allie pasquier on Flickr under a Creative Commons License

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