From McClatchy Newspapers- U.S. opens new product safety lab:
The opening of a start-of-the-art testing lab Monday for the chief federal consumer protection agency will give Washington more muscle in preventing Americans from buying and using unsafe products.
Inez Tenenbaum, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said the new center outside Washington will enable her agency to do better, faster and cheaper tests of the products its inspectors confiscate at the nation’s ports and in unannounced retail store sweeps.
“This is a moment many years in the making,” Tenenbaum told reporters outside the lab in a Maryland suburb 25 miles north of the nation’s capital. “This brand new testing facility behind me is an investment in the safety of American families.”
The 32,000-sqare-foot center is 2 1/2 times bigger than the aging, leaking lab the CPSC had used for decades, with a limited testing capacity that required the agency to hire private firms to evaluate some products.
The new center has 75 engineers and other scientists, almost double the number who worked at the CPSC’s previous lab at a nearby site that was used as an Army missile radar site until 1975.
“Every test they run, every result they record, every hazard they detect, is about one thing in the end — keeping children and consumers safe,” Tenenbaum said.
The center has nine labs to run specialized tests on imported and domestic goods that kill or maim hundreds of Americans a year, from toys and other children’s products to pools and spas, bike helmets and electronics.
Congress increased the commission’s power in 2008 when it passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act after a wave of high-profile recalls of mainly Chinese-made toys with high levels of lead.
The opening of a start-of-the-art testing lab Monday for the chief federal consumer protection agency will give Washington more muscle in preventing Americans from buying and using unsafe products.
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