Mattel Recall

[Super_Megatron]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/bu...gewanted=print

[Nightscrabbler]

Originally Posted by Super_Megatron

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20240769/

Mattel is still the #1 toy company with Hasbro #2.

Yes, but they have internal problems according to what I have heard.

[Beechy]

Point is....Keep your toys out of your mouth. If parents are giving toys ment for 9 yr olds to a 3 year old, then they somewhat deserve the wait in the emergency room.

[Aernaroth]

Originally Posted by Robimus

I'm not trying to down play this problem but all the toys my parents played with had lead paint and they are going strong at almost seventy. Many antique toys made with metal use lead paint as well.Use caution for sure but I think the biggest concern here is that small children are going to lick the paint off and eat it.

You're right, the vast majority of kids aren't going to die from this, even if they ingest some lead, but the odds are a small portion will suffer adverse health effects, and that's why they're worried. Even then, I believe the bigger problem is that these toys aren't supposed to be using lead paints at all, are they?

[Robimus]

If my entire post was quoted that very fact is there. I'm just saying that I don't think grown up Transformer collectors have anything to worry about. Companies are absolutely responsible to make safe toys and when they find toys are not safe to recall them. As Mattel has done on more than one occasion now. Somebody in china either made a bad decision or a mistake and now Mattel is going to spend millions of dollars fixing that mistake and they should. I think Mattel is doing the right thing here, imagine if a dollar store toy was found to have lead in the paint? You think the company that made it would offer a recall? I doubt it.
Mattel discovered a mistake themselves and came clean about it, they can't go back in time and undo the mistake so they are taking all the steps they can to make sure the problem doesn't happen again. This is probably a good thing for the toy industry in the long run.

[Aernaroth]

I have nothing against Mattel's act of recalling these toys. That was a good idea. What I'm trying to say is the fact that we're seeing toys that do not meet our safety codes, whether or not I use my alternator mirage as a toothbrush, means that something has gone terribly terribly wrong with the safeguards, both public and private, that are meant to prevent these products from reaching shelves in the first place. Now, I'm not certain if the recall was made as a cautionary action or if a certain amount of these toys actually did have unacceptable lead, but I find it sad that we should even have to worry about something like this.

So yeah, I see what you're saying there about it not really being much to really get in a fuss over, but I am. Oh well. And to answer your question about dollar store items and companies, I would hope that if their products were unsafe and they failed to remove them by themselves, that another, legitimate authority would force them to or do it themselves.

[PG13]

I could make a terrible joke about a Barbie doll and my mouth, but I think I'll leave it be..

[Robimus]

Yeah they should have better safeguards in place, totally agreed.

I had this thought while at work. What is the difference between lead in paint and lead in a pencil? Is pencil lead not really lead? Just a thought. Maybe somebody with some scientific type knowledge about this could offer up an answer. Thanks.

[Aernaroth]

There is no lead in a pencil (unless its has a metal body, in which case its conceivable, but highly unlikely). The "lead" in a pencil is actually a mixture of wax and graphite. Graphite is an allotrope of carbon, forming hexagonally-arranged atomic groups on a two-dimensional plane. It is this arrangement that makes it hard and brittle, but not as hard as diamond, another allotrope of carbon that forms in three-dimensional networks.

So if you eat pencil lead, its essentially the same as biting a burnt candle. It won't cause any health problems unless you eat tons of it.

Hopefully this answers your question.

Now you know!

[Robimus]

I figured it wasn't really lead, thanks for clearing that up.