N.K. group fighting for national cadmium standard

The first children’s-jewelry safety scare involved lead.
Then about three years ago investigations showed some foreign manufacturers had replaced lead in fashion and costume jewelry with the cheaper, but similarly hazardous, cadmium.
So the American jewelry industry, along with state and federal governments, began working on ways to get the cadmium out of jewelry too.
For the industry, one major question stood out: would cadmium be governed by one national standard or would each state make its own rules?
The North Kingstown-based Fashion Jewelry & Accessories Trade Association, which represents more than 200 businesses in manufacturing, retailing and importing, led the industry effort to create a national cadmium standard in children’s jewelry. The group worked with ASTM International, a material standards and testing organization, to develop a scientific, minimum safe cadmium level and standard testing protocol for detecting the metal.
The cadmium limits and testing standards were accepted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, but FJATA’s hope that Congress would make them federal law, superceding all state laws, never happened.
A group of environmental organizations led by the Sierra Club petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to adopt an even-stricter set of cadmium limits, and although the Consumer Product Safety Commission rejected the petition last October, some states have used that standard as the foundation of laws.
So FJATA is now working state by state to make sure the cadmium standards it helped develop spread.
“State laws are definitely causing confusion, and our mission is to cause harmonization of standards, not only nationally but globally, so you don’t have different production lines for different states,” said FJATA Executive Director Brent Cleaveland. “We are making progress.”
The industry-supported, voluntary standard allows any item with less than 300 parts per million of cadmium.
For pieces found to contain more than 300 parts per million of cadmium to be sold, they must pass a test of how much cadmium would leach off of them if digested. This agitated bath test can produce no more than 200 parts per million of cadmium. The Sierra Club proposal would have banned any product with 75 parts per million of cadmium.
So far, eight states have approved some form of cadmium limits for children’s jewelry, with several others with bills pending in their respective legislatures.
Befitting a state with historic ties to the jewelry industry, Rhode Island last year became the first state to pass a comprehensive children’s-jewelry law based entirely on the FJATA-ASTM standards.
California also has a law that sets the limit at 300 parts per million, Illinois and Minnesota have laws based on the 75-parts-per-million Sierra Club limit, while Connecticut and Maryland restrict cadmium content by weight to 0.0075 percent of an item’s mass (which is effectively similar to the Sierra Club limit).
Washington state has the strictest cadmium limit in the country, at 40 parts per million, but Cleaveland said he has not known it to be enforced.
Massachusetts is considering a 75-parts-per-million law that FJATA is lobbying against; while New York state has a bill pending that would adopt the 300 parts-per-million standard.
Cleaveland argues that the 75-parts-per-million limit is arbitrary, while the voluntary ASTM standard was developed through tests to find out what levels are actually dangerous.
Some materials, such as glass, can contain high metal levels by weight, but are not toxic because the metals are chemically bound and don’t migrate even if swallowed, he said, pointing to why the dissolved cadmium test is the best measure of safety.
“This is the only science-based standard; it wasn’t just pulled out of the air,” Cleaveland said.
In addition to the cadmium limit, Rhode Island’s child-jewelry law also includes the ASTM standards for lead, nickel, heavy metals in surface coatings, magnets, batteries, liquid-filled jewelry and breakaway necklaces.
The Rhode Island law did have at least one problem: the language limited the regulations to only products “made in” Rhode Island, instead of any jewelry sold in the state. A follow-up bill sponsored by state Sen. James C. Sheehan, D-Narragansett, passed last month and now includes all jewelry sold in the state.
Used in a number of industrial applications such as batteries, cadmium was never a big part of American jewelry making, but often turns up, usually in tiny traces, in jewelry components imported from Asia.
At fashion-jewelry designer and manufacturer Tanya Creations Inc. in East Providence, even though the company does not make any children’s jewelry, the brands it makes pieces for insist on following the strictest laws for children’s products.
Because it is not feasible to make and segregate products for each state, the laws from the strictest states become the de-facto standard.
Tanya Creations assembles products from imported components made by as many as 20 different factories around the world.
Quality Control Manager Roger Ducharme said it’s very rare that any pieces they receive exceed cadmium levels, and when they do, it is usually in trace amounts that slipped into a material by mistake.
But because the 110-employee company produces so many different pieces made of different materials, they have to test all of them.
“Occasionally we do see a piece with so much cadmium we feel it must have been used intentionally. And because fashion jewelry changes on a whim, we are always scouting out different suppliers,” Ducharme said. “In our case lead is still more frequently added for metallurgic reasons than cadmium.”
The testing can be costly, with Tanya Creations’ testing budget totaling about $1 million, Ducharme said.
To try to lessen that burden, Tanya Creations is pushing for legislation in Rhode Island that would establish more lenient rules for adult jewelry based on the fact that adults aren’t likely to chew or swallow their necklaces.
“The difficulty for us is we still have to test for it even though we know 99.9 percent of the time there’s nothing there,” Ducharme said. •

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