Yahoo Finance Toy safety process thorough, but unexpected dangers still sneak through
'Tis the season for dangerous and harmful toys.
On November 18, World Against Toys Causing Harm, (W.A.T.C.H.) a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about dangerous children's products and protecting children from harm, released their annual “10 Worst Toys” list just in time for the holiday season. This year's list includes toys that have the potential to cause everything from allergic reactions and choking hazards to strangulation, head and neck or blunt force trauma injuries.
Meanwhile, Canadian toymaker Spin Master recently drew the ire of concerned parents who reported their children got the company's sticky Bunchems building toy stuck in their hair. This forced Spin Master to enhance their warning against putting the toy near your hair and release a video on how to take them out.
“Since Spin Master launched Bunchems in August 2015, we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from children, parents and industry partners,” Arlene Biran, Spin Master's Vice President of Marketing, said in a statement.
“Bunchems are colourful, soft, tactile balls that make endless creations. However, they are intended only to be adhered to other Bunchems. This is particularly important for parents and caregivers to understand. The Bunchems packaging and directions clearly state: 'Caution: Keep away from hair. May become entangled.' We recently changed the colour of the warning to make it even more identifiable when opening the packaging,” it reads.
All of this negative publicity leaves parents and toy enthusiasts wondering, what does it take to test a toy for safety and how do some problematic toys slip through the cracks?
Up to standard
The very first thing any toy designer needs to do, right from conception, at the behest of a product manager or a quality and engineering manager, is prepare a bill of materials. The bill of materials lists all the components and sub-assemblies that are going into that toy and it depends on those materials, and how they will be assembled, what safety and quality standards the final product needs to be tested to.
“If the toy is a doll that contains fabric, then there are a whole set of fabric standards around toys,” says Karen Rayment, an electrical engineer and product designer by trade who now works as a failure analysis consultant at CASE Forensics' offices in San Fransisco.
“If it is a toy with a wheel and axel that a child rolls along the floor, there's a whole set of mechanical standards that say pieces can't fly off – that's a choking hazard – and it must be measured by dropping it from a prescribed height onto a concrete floor and if it breaks, no small pieces can be small enough to be ingested.”
Every toy must be designed and built according to standards. Those standards are different depending on where the toy will be sold and what age group the toy is designed for. Some toys for younger children must be tested more rigorously than those designed and sold for older children, for instance.
There are different standards for different types of toys and different types of materials, but all toys assembled a certain way, and made from certain types of materials, must be tested the same way. Each standard has its own prescribed test suite, conducted by an independent, third-party lab.
“Third-party tests include anything that goes into the toy, plus the assembled toy itself. Some of the standards state things like, 'a toy (must) be dropped four times onto a tile-covered concrete floor. Each drop is conducted with the toy in a different orientation, and the orientations chosen must be likely to cause the worst damage,'” says Rayment.
Tests can include, but aren't limited to, drop tests, impact tests, tension tests, textile tests and compression tests. If the toy does not pass its myriad of specifically prescribed tests, it does not meet its prescribed standards and cannot be sold to the public.
Random sampling after toy goes into mass production
For every test a toy passes, it is certified for those corresponding standards. If a toy fails a test, designers have an opportunity to make adjustments and ask the lab to perform a re-test. The point of testing really early in the design phase is to fix any problems before the toy makes it to manufacturing and hundreds come off the assembly line.
“If you're concerned about a particular issue with a toy – maybe you think a piece could easily break off during standards testing – you can send it to the lab for pre-compliance testing on that one issue, which is cheaper than running the whole design test suite,” says Rayment.
But testing doesn't stop at the design phase. The mass-production of a toy can sometimes degrade the original design, so the toy will need to be re-assessed after manufacturing.
“You're going to want to save that pre-compliance, and initial compliance testing data for the manufacturing phase two years later because the prototypes you take to lab are often hand-built and often made by a very expensive prototyping process, so everyone involved pays attention to the prototypes,” says Rayment.
“However, once you get to manufacturing, the manufacturer could be making the toy from a thinner, less durable plastic to make it cheaper, so you may want to pull a few sample toys off the line and test them against the original base line of compliance data you received during the design phase,” says Rayment.
It's up to the design team to tell the manufacturers exactly what needs to be done to keep the toy up to standard in the build instructions.
“The thing that happens most frequently is the engineering team assumes when they write down a certain type of plastic it will always be used. But, the manufacturers may have gotten incomplete information or they're training new people who know the plastic is blue, but there are hundreds of blue plastics, so they take the most accessible plastic off the warehouse shelf and it turns out to be not the right kind,” continues Rayment.
Often manufacturing is contracted out to another country where language barriers exist and the assembly line can't be directly controlled by the toy company, so pulling a few samples and testing them during manufacturing is critical.
Plus, manufacturers need to make the toy scalable, so it's affordable for the public, but Rayment says that doesn't mean they have to sacrifice quality or safety standards.
“Using cheaper or less material [are] only two ways to make a product cheaper. There's a whole toolbox a manufacturer has access to for cost reduction. They can also use standardized parts and receive a discount from the part maker based on an economy of scale – the number of parts the manufacturers are guaranteed to order.”
Why accidents still happen
With all the oversight, all the testing of standards and certification for each phase of a toy's development – from design to packaging – how do unsafe toys still make it to store shelves?
Sometimes a toy is only dangerous within a very narrow set of circumstances and those circumstances weren't tested for, so it made it to stores, but other times, unauthorized manufacturing changes occur.
“If you're a manufacturer with a set of build instructions from a design team, you must always build it exactly as written. You cannot make unauthorized deviations from the build instructions under any circumstances,” says Rayment.
Sometimes unknowing deviations are made – like the warehouse employee who pulled the wrong blue plastic. In those cases, it's a mistake and human error. Also, there are the times a supplier uses substandard materials.
“If you have to ship thousands of TVs by a certain date, there's no way you can check every single component for every single TV. Mistakes can be made featuring substandard components by reputable manufacturers even though the manufacturer built it exactly the way they were supposed to. As a manufacturer, you really have to trust your suppliers and try very hard to get them to supply all testing documentation on standards tests that they performed, but that isn’t always easy or available,” says Rayment.
Finally, there are unforeseeable circumstances.
“Children's toys are manufactured to stimulate imaginative play. No trained engineer or product designer can design a toy that will satisfy all children's imaginations infinitely, so it's impossible to predict with a toy how children will use it and not all uses are foreseeable,” says Rayment.
Children use their imaginations to play with all sorts of consumer products, not just toys. One real case Rayment dealt with saw a preteen boy take the extension cord for the backyard garden lights and plug it into his mom's hair dryer before duct taping the hair dryer around his middle – a thruster for his imagined jetpack – turn on the dryer, jump in the pool and get electrocuted.
“Was that foreseeable abuse for duct tape and a hair dryer? Who is responsible for that child's death? That's for the courts to decide,” says Rayment.
But thankfully, Rayment will tell you that for all the product development stages, the standardized testing and the many people involved in all aspects of a toy's creation, most toys somehow make it to stores without any problems. “It’s pretty cool that even though at any point so much could go wrong, it almost always doesn’t.”
