phil&teds first company to comply with US standard
phil&teds becomes the first and only juvenile hardware company to achieve full compliance with the new CPSIA standard in the US
CPSIA is the Consumer Products Safety Improvements Act enacted last year, and is managed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
This new and extremely rigorous product safety legislation seeks to remove or reduce the risk of materials used in products hence improving the safety of juvenile products. It involves extensive and expensive testing. But it has allowed phil&teds to confirm the robustness, and globally certified safety of the many products that they sell in the US and worldwide.
The quality of information and previous testing done in the ordinary course of our business made this a labour-intensive, costly, but relatively straightforward exercise. Fiona van Petegem B.E. (hons), phil&teds’ head of quality assurance, chief engineer & professor of safety certification, has been working on this project full time for the last 3 months. Due to her outstanding work phil&teds are the only company to have achieved compliance by the deadline of 10 February 2009. In fact due to the lack of compliance achieved across the industry, CPSC have had to extend the deadline date.
“The process involved over 300 unique tests,” said Fiona, “and after all the hard work I’m thrilled and the results speak for themselves.”
The testing process identified each of the many materials and coatings used on each of phil&teds products, and tested every unique material for any toxic or environmentally harmful substances, in addition to flammability and other mechanical hazards (choking hazards, sharp edges etc).
“phil&teds have been doing this type of testing for many years but this gave us the opportunity to make sure that our testing is fully up to date and accurate,” says Fiona.
This is why the CPSC is so
crucial to the industry, and why phil&teds is so supportive
of their work.
“Not only do we know that our products
are safe, we have test certificates from a 3rd party test
house that verify this.”
The benefit of this extends to product manufactured for sale outside the USA, too.
ENDS