New Law - Second Hand Items Illegal

Hey everyone.

Yes it's been a long time I know. Shame on me. I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday. We did at our house despite bronchitis. Lauren and Kevin had a new baby girl! She is just precious!

I hate to be short and sweet and to the point, but I found out something this morning that has really angered me.

Apparently our government has decided to "Improve" our Consumer Safety Product Law.

You can check out the link, it's boring, but in short: As of Feb. 10, 2009 it will be illegal to pass on second hand clothing, toys and children's products in general. Yes, this includes Thrift Stores, Consignment sales, yard sales and Ebay (GASP). There is a $100,000 dollar fine if you are caught and up to 5 years in prison. They want a third party to inspect anything that is passed on second hand.

They expect us to destroy any items that we no longer use, and simply throw them away. This will do extreme damage to our landfills which I don't guess they thought about. Anyway, I'm no expert on government issues, but this is a section from an e-mail that I received from an owner of a local consignment sale:


Many of you may may have heard of a new law called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2009 that passed last August. Reality is most likely you didn't hear about it because while we were all interested in presidential politics, congress overwhelmingly passed a law that as of February 10, 2009 will make our consignment sale and other sources of second hand childrens' items illegal. This is a huge issue as it affects Salvation Army, Thrift stores, garage sales, Ebay, etc. All you have to do is Google CPSIA 2008 and you can read for hours. The problem is all you can read is speculative interpretation of the law itself. You can pull up the law and read it (trust me, only section 108 is close to understandable and it will make you sleepy).
Here is a passage from the link that was listed above:

The CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in children's products, mandates third party testing and certification, and requires manufacturers of all goods for children under the age of 12, to permanently label each item with a date and batch number.All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational companies to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each item have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and updating their systems to include batch labels. Small businesses however, will likely be driven out of business by the costs of mandatory testing, to the tune of as much as $4,000 or more per item. And the few larger manufacturers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.Anyone who produces or sells any of the following new or used items will be required to comply with the law: toys, books, clothing, art, music, educational supplies, materials for the learning disabled, bicycles, and more. Any uncertified item intended for children under the age of 12 will be considered contraband after February 10, 2009.
It will be illegal to sell or give these items away to charities, and the government will require their destruction or permanent disposal, resulting in millions of tons of unnecessary waste, and placing an enormous strain on our landfills.


I know this is all boring to read, but it is important! Please contact your local gov. officials and stress your concern and disapproval of this new law.

More happy posts to come. Promise.