Third of toys from China tested too toxic for children

Nearly a third of the toys on store shelves contain heavy metals and about 10 per cent have lead levels that exceed national safety standards, Greenpeace said in a report.

Greenpeace campaigner Ada Kong Cheuk-san said she and her colleagues had bought toys in Hong Kong and four big mainland cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan. In a month they gathered 500 samples and screened them with a handheld X-ray scanner that could detect six kinds of heavy metals - antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury - that were known to have lasting and devastating health effects even when present in small quantities.

The highest reading, from a green toy ring, recorded a lead level of 120,960 parts per million - more than 200 times the safety standard on the mainland and more than 1,300 times the standard in the United States.

The results gathered presented some discrepancy from the national inspection conducted by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine early this year, which examined more than 240 samples on the mainland, found only one product with excessive levels of heavy metal. According to Sun Xiaogang, sales manager for the China Certification & Inspection Group, such could be the result of different testing methods. While Greenpeace detected the total amount of heavy metals on the surface of a product, the government used a more sophisticated method, dipping the sample in solutions chemically similar to human sweat and stomach fluid to find out how much heavy metal would leak out from the sample after a certain period, Sun said.

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