Dangerous Trade
We've all probably heard by now about U.S. companies that import dangerous toys and other products from China. Now Russell Carollo of The Sacramento Bee reveals that U.S. companies export equally dangerous goods to other countries. His story last week, "U.S. Ships Unsafe Products," shows that from October 1993 to September 2006, the Consumer Product Safety Commission approved 991 out of 1,031 requests (96 percent) by U.S. firms to export products it had already deemed unsafe for Americans. These products can be even more dangerous in countries that have few resources to devote toward consumer protection, he writes. Carollo tracked down the information by sifting through a Consumer Product Safety Commission database and gaining hundreds of pages of documents through the Freedom of Information Act. www.sacbee.com/101/story/368866.html
A big thanks to Brian Summers for recommending this story.