Report from ANSI World Standards Week
Last week I was in Washington DC attending ANSI’s World Standards Week. This annual WSW event is comprised of meetings of the various ANSI committees and member forums. A major theme this year has been that of consumer confidence related to the issue of product recalls, many of which are for items from China, including most recently toys. This is a big issue as we enter the holiday gift-buying season; parents want to be certain that the toys they buy for their children are safe. Representatives from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and from various consumer interest groups attended the ANSI meetings, and the representative of the Toy Industry Association was on the hot seat for many of the discussions.
The issue of toy safety, which has been in the news almost daily for the last couple of months, is one of standards. But it’s not a question of the need for standards – there’s already a lot of them in place – but of enforcement. Given the nature of the enforcement and the quantities involved, this becomes an issue of conformance testing and certification. The enforcers of the safety standards, which are codified into laws and regulations, are the laboratories which test products to ensure that they comply with applicable standards. Examples of each type of toy, and each manufacturing lot, need to be tested. That’s a lot of work.
But who is qualified to do the testing? Can the manufacturers do the testing themselves? With which testing laboratories can they contract to do the work? Or should the government do the testing?
Part of the discussion at the ANSI meetings was around this topic. The CPSC is a candidate for the body that would certify testing labs to do the work, but ANSI is suggesting that this is a role for which it is better suited, both for the sake of separating the regulation-setting and certification roles and because there is precedent for ANSI certifying conformance-testing labs in other areas. ANSI has listed its role in support of consumer confidence among its top priorities for the coming year.
The broader lesson here is that standards by themselves are only part of any solution. Whether the standard is for a consumer product or not, the standards developer must define a means by which the standard can be enforced, usually be defining tests for conformance. How do you know if a standard is being followed or not? And further, who is qualified and/or authorized to decide? These are all issues to be settled as part of the standards development process.