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More than 15,000 people bought school supplies and jewelry for young children containing dangerous levels of lead and cadmium in 2017 and 2018, Washington state investigators said.
Even after Amazon was informed of the illegal products for children and said they had removed them, investigators found some of the same products, as well as others containing metals at levels well in excess of the legal maximum. Lead and cadmium can both damage the nervous system, liver, kidneys and other internal organs, and are particularly harmful to children.
Under an agreement announced Thursday by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Amazon must require third-party sellers of these products that they provide certificates attesting to their safety and their compliance with US laws and regulations. consumer protection. Manufacturers and importers must already have such certification, but they are generally not required to show it to retailers or distributors. Amazon does not admit any fault in the contract.
The Seattle-based technology and trade giant will also contribute $ 700,000 to the Ferguson office to fund ongoing investigations into environmental and product safety issues.
About 600 of these sales were made with Washington State customers, the company's office announced.
The products, mainly made in China, were sold on Amazon by third-party merchants, an increasingly important part of its retail business. These sellers, who use Amazon's marketplace and logistics network to reach their customers, accounted for 58% of the company's gross merchandise sales in 2018, which founder and CEO Jeff Bezos praised in his letter. shareholders last month. Amazon has raised nearly $ 43 billion in commissions and fees from third-party sellers in 2018.
The investigation began in the spring of 2017, shortly after Ferguson created a new environmental protection unit in the Attorney General's office.
The investigators worked with researchers from the State Department of Ecology, who had previously studied school supplies and other seasonal products that may contain high concentrations of hazardous metals.
During the shopping season for the fall of 2017, they bought 43 products on Amazon, including plush pencil cases and backpacks with cartoon characters and bright colors designed to appeal to children under the age of 15. 12 years. 43 products had illegal levels of lead and cadmium.
"This is very worrying for children's health," said Ferguson, who has 11-year-old twins, and pointed out that children often spend a lot of time with expensive objects.
"We're talking about products that kids eat and keep all day and all night," he said.
The Ferguson office sent civil investigation requests to Amazon for product-related documents, which allowed Amazon to know the results of the test. These findings "would have been detected by Amazon's radar" in April 2018, said Kelly Wood, Assistant Attorney General of the Environmental Protection Unit.
The company immediately informed the investigators that she had removed the illegal products from her site, Wood said.
"We immediately went back to the website and found these products," he said.
The investigators made another round of purchases in the fall of 2018. This time, 35 of the 41 products purchased on Amazon.com exceeded the legal limits for lead or cadmium, some with a maximum several times the threshold. 100% per million for lead and 40 ppm for cadmium.
The company met with the investigators in December 2018. At that time, Wood said that Amazon had removed the illegal items. They started negotiations on a possible remedy and the company cooperated and seemed willing to solve the problem, he said.
Wood said the investigators did not fully understand what Amazon was doing to enforce consumer safety laws from its third-party merchants prior to the investigation.
"They are a bit of a black box in terms of their internal procedures," said Woods.
A representative of the company said in a statement that "customer safety was Amazon's top priority", but did not answer specific questions about how to ensure this security, especially on Auditing third-party sellers or one of the third-party sellers of dangerous schools. children's supplies and jewelry had been sanctioned or removed from his market.
Ferguson, at Thursday's press conference, said, "Frankly, Amazon was not doing the job. You can not really make sugar. "
Wood stated that toxic materials are typically found in metal parts such as zippers and zipper eyelets, as well as in paints and decorations. A stuffed green frog, essentially a stuffed animal with a pencil case, has two plastic eyes containing 8,500 parts of lead per million.
All or almost all of the products tested in the survey were made in China, Wood said.
"I do not think it's a secret, they have more flexible manufacturing standards than we have in this country," he added.
It is the responsibility of manufacturers and importers of these products to produce a child product certificate, which must be based on test results from an accredited laboratory and to ensure that distributors and retailers comply with US law. These certificates are generally not reported to consumers as part of the packaging of a product; instead, buyers rely on the retailer, who must be in possession of the CPC.
The Ferguson office said in a press release that Amazon had informed buyers of hazardous products, had made repayments of over $ 200,000 and had provided information to the Federal Commission for Product Safety. consumption "to initiate a recall process".
No recall notices for the products in question were posted on the CPSC's website on Thursday afternoon, and a spokesperson said the agency could not comment on potential recalls.
A recall was made for a set of children's musical instruments containing a lot of lead sold exclusively on Amazon.com in the summer of 2018. This would appear to be inconsistent with the product categories covered by this investigation.
"We remain interested in reviewing these products and other products both at Amazon and at other retailers and we plan to continue working in this area," said Wood.
This story has been updated to properly describe the requirements of the agreement for certificates attesting to the safety of products imported under US law.
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