Banned chemicals found in toys

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Apr 23

RE: Banned chemicals found in kids’ toys.  News item by Kevin Jiang of the Toronto Star.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 12 Apr 23.

How could banned chemicals be put into kids’ toys you ask?  Because the chemicals in question aren’t banned everywhere.  As chlorinated paraffins became progressively eliminated by government regulators, manufacturing of the products which need them moved to Asia.  Government regulators thought they were eliminating a threat, and all they did was eliminate jobs in North America.

Parents should not be alarmed by such reports.  There never was a definitive study that established a link between cancer and chlorinated paraffin.  Oh, there were lots of dark hints, and worrisome speculation starting in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, government regulators started banning chemicals on the basis of “precaution.”  Industry didn’t resist at first because there were alternatives, more expensive to be sure; but in a time of inflation it was easy to raise prices.

Eventually, the chain length under consideration got so long that even the regulators couldn’t justify pushing a ban in the face of growing industrial resistance.  And so short chain chlorinated paraffins remain banned here out of precaution based on nothing but old fearmongering and speculation.  And Asia benefited, because that’s where the big manufacturers went when the regulatory climate here got too crazy and expensive.

Parents need not fear exposing their kids to cancer causing chemicals, because, for one thing, those chemicals are locked in the material and are not easily removed.

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As you can probably tell, I lived through this. I remember electricians telling me that they worked up to their elbows in PCBs before that chemical was banned.  PCB were commonly used in big electrical transformers back in the day.