The regular drumbeat of recalled products this week included:
Corduroy jackets with strangle-prone drawstrings
Carbon monoxide and smoke alarms that don’t sound when they’re supposed to
Leaf blowers that might fire projectiles

and a local product:

Tumble Tower Infant Rattles, sold by Manhattan Group LLC of Minneapolis, are five inches long and have blue plastic end caps that can break, “resulting in small parts, posing a choking hazard to young children,” according to the recall notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The company has two reports of the end caps breaking, but no injuries have been reported. The recall affects about 7,000 units, which were sold at “gift and specialty stores nationwide, mail order catalogs, and the Internet from September 2007 through April 2008 for about $15.”

The CPSC notes that the rattles were made in China, which of course makes just about everything these days, but as usual omits the name of the factory or even the city. As a consumer, that’s information I’d like to know. By contrast, the recall for the 23,000 Shindaiwa Backpack Blowers notes they were manufactured by Shindaiwa Kogyo Co. Ltd. of Hiroshima, Japan and imported by Shindaiwa Corp. of Tualatin, Oregon.

The web site for Manhattan Toy, known for its “Groovy Girl” dolls, includes a statement about its commitment to safe toys.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Dangerous products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.