You are a good parent. You have booked your kid in for scuba diving lessons. You have put out big bucks for a really cool wet suit with a neat little screen-printed logo. But you are also a concerned and safety-conscious parent so you have made sure that the logo was screen printed with ink certified to be lead free, that is, less than 100 parts of lead per million.
Now your kid is ready to dive fully protected from the possibility of being poisoned by any lead in the little screen-printed logo on the suit. So strap on the 20 lb lead weight diving belt on your child and let’s go!
Whaaat?!!
Exactly!
One has to ask. Has this legislation been thought through properly?
Thanks to the customer who brought this example to our attention today. His company manufactures wet suits in three places around the globe. It seems that he now has to go to a lot of trouble and expense to switch to lead-free and phthalate-free ink and to have the prints on children’s wet suits certified by an independent accredited laboratory. He quite rightly wonders by what reasoning the 20 lb lead weight belt is exempt. If you have any similar examples, email me at michael.best@screenflex.ca We might as well get a bit of a laugh out of this, even as we are being forced to comply.
