Introduction

The Fashion Jewelry and Accessories Trade Association (FJATA) represents the interests of over 225 member companies, including manufacturers, suppliers and retailers of jewelry and accessories. FJATA members range from family owned businesses that manufacture and distribute jewelry found typically in specialty stores, department stores and chain stores to large national retailers. Our members operate in a highly dynamic and competitive industry to provide attractive, high-quality, safe jewelry and accessories to adults and children worldwide. FJATA serves as the voice of its members before Congress, federal agencies, state legislatures and regulatory agencies, and key standards-making bodies.

FJATA and its members care deeply about the safety of our products, and safety is the number one priority for our industry. FJATA members have worked tirelessly to ensure that their products meet all applicable federal safety standards under the rigorous Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA). After coping with some of the most challenging economic times in memory in 2009, spending millions of dollars testing, and destroying inventory due to the retroactive nature of the new lead limits and the failure to grant a crystal exemption, jewelry suppliers and retailers were looking forward to spending 2010 focused solely on making safe products that bring joy to millions of children and adults every day. Then, on January 10, 2010, an Associated Press (AP) story falsely accused the children’s jewelry industry of widely substituting cadmium for lead in their products.

This one AP story – based on data from a professor at Ohio’s Ashland University that to this day has never been published or shared with the industry, including the companies it accused by name – started a snowball effect that has resulted in the industry being unfairly attacked by consumer groups, becoming a political punching bag for Members of Congress and state legislators and the target of regulators. It’s time to set the record straight about cadmium in jewelry.

Cadmium in Jewelry

Cadmium is a heavy metal found in nature with ores used in metals. Metals are used to make jewelry and jewelry components. Cadmium has been present in fashion and fine jewelry for decades with no adverse health effects to either children or adults. Cadmium is present, typically in trace amounts, in metal components, such as zinc or tin, used to make fashion jewelry. In precious metal jewelry, including karat gold jewelry and sterling silver jewelry, cadmium has been a component in solders used in joining jewelry parts. These solders melt and flow better at a lower temperature than non-cadmium solders. Cadmium solder, at about a 300 ppm level, is also used as a filler in gold and silver wire.

Zinc alloys, per third party standards such as those of the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) B 240 series, and similar international standards in Japan and the European Union, restrict cadmium to low, trace amounts. Cadmium may also be present in low, trace amounts in pure tin. Cadmium may be alloyed with tin to improve melt and flow, resulting in an ability to obtain filigree effects often seen in adult jewelry. Cadmium may also be used in some plating processes to promote adhesion and minimize corrosion. In addition to use in metals, cadmium is used as a stabilizer in certain plastics, and is also used in some pigments.

Green initiatives in the fine jewelry industry promote and support reuse of scrap, or recast, material. Often karat gold and sterling silver metal fabrication begins with clean scrap material which is free of oil, grease and contaminates and contains low levels of cadmium. Average total cadmium content in karat gold and silver may range from about 20 ppm to about 75 ppm, for example.

Despite the media hype, the presence of cadmium at these traditional levels has not been associated with any adverse health effects to consumers.

An article published in the Washington Post on January 14, 2010 quotes John Rosen, chief of environmental sciences at the Children’s Hospital in New York: “Very little is known about cadmium’s potential health effects on children because it’s never been known to be a problem. Pediatricians don’t look for it, they aren’t knowledgeable about it, and there are not any particular concerns about it….If cadmium does have an effect on children through [exposure to cadmium-containing jewelry], it would be kidney disease, which would constitute virtually a new disease in American children.”

It is not surprising that there have been no adverse health effects known from the presence of cadmium in jewelry at traditional levels. Scientific data show the principal danger of exposure to cadmium is from inhalation – not a likely scenario with jewelry.

The Roots of the “Cadmium Crisis”

The January 10, 2010 Associated Press story accused the children’s jewelry industry of widely and deliberately substituting cadmium for lead in their products. This has led to a series of actions related to cadmium that has affected not only jewelry, but other products as well.

• Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Chairman Inez Tenenbaum immediately made the sweeping statement to parents to “not allow young children to be given or to play with cheap metal jewelry, especially when they are unsupervised.”
• Members of Congress and state legislators rushed to announce legislation to ban cadmium and other metals in children’s products. Cadmium-related legislation has passed California, Minnesota, Illinois and Connecticut, and is being considered by several other state legislatures. Illinois and Minnesota passed laws that include a migratable standard for cadmium in jewelry, based on the internationally-accepted EN-71 test used to evaluate toys. Total content laws (in other words, laws that only consider the amount of cadmium in the jewelry and not what migrates or “gets out” is pending in California (300pm) and passed in Connecticut (75ppm).
• CPSC announced several recalls of jewelry but has not publicly released information on the risk standards it is applying; and
• The frenzy reached a fever pitch when an anonymous caller alerted Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) to the trace presence of cadmium in Shrek glasses being sold by McDonald’s. McDonald’s and the CPSC announced a voluntary recall of the glasses. The recall made for a great story with media outlets. Following the initial release, the CPSC started to distribute confusing tweets and e-mails to reporters declaring that the glasses are safe, but consumers should stop using them anyway. Such statements by CPSC include, “Note to reporters: the recalled McDonald’s glasses are not toxic,” and “the level of cadmium was ‘slightly above the protective level currently being developed by the agency,” but refusing to say what the protective level is or how much the glasses allegedly exceed it.

Cadmium Standards

Around the world, exposure of children to certain heavy metals, including cadmium, in toys is regulated based on a migration standard (what would be absorbed if ingested). The basis of risk assessment for these limits is derived from a European Union (EU) standard, Standard EN 71-3. Similar limits and approaches based on EN -71 are incorporated in the U.S. standard for surface coatings of toys (ASTM F-963) and the International Organization for Standards (ISO) ISO-8124-3. The ASTM and ISO standards adopt the migration limits and correction factors of EN-71, although there are slight variations in methodology. EN-71 is predicated on assessments of migration limits or “bioavailability” rather than total content limits, because such an approach is required under the EU Toy Safety Directive. Migration limits are viewed as more toxicologically accurate than total content limits, since such an approach addresses potential risk from mouthing or accidentally swallowing an item, based on testing the material in simulated gastric juices.

The migration limits reflected in the EU Toy Safety Directive reflect very conservative risk assessment approaches. Acceptable dietary intake of the specific metals by adults were reduced by half to reflect intake by children, then adjusted further to restrict contribution from toys from expected mouthing or ingestion to still lower thresholds expressed as a percentage of the daily intake. Since adverse health effects associated with exposure to heavy metals in products relates to exposure under relevant use conditions (hand-to-mouth contact, mouthing, or swallowing), globally there is a health-based preference for regulations or standards based on bioavailability (migration) of materials, rather than total content limits. This is the case, for example, with regulations on materials in foods or materials that contact food. Data on migration can also be used to develop total content screening levels that are deemed unlikely to result in migratable limits that exceed accepted values.

The U.S. toy safety standard, ASTM F-963, establishes limits on soluble heavy metals in surface coatings of toys based on EN-71. Thus, solubility or migration testing is now a mandatory federal standard for toys through enactment by Congress of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) of 2008, thus reflecting an approach to testing heavy metals in children’s products endorsed by the Congress of the United States.

Many FJATA members in fact test children’s jewelry to meet EN-71 standards for migratable cadmium, and products routinely pass this internationally-accepted test. There are no reports of adverse health effects associated with exposure – including via accidental ingestion – from either toys or jewelry that meet ASTM F-963/EN-71 migration standards. FJATA is taking a leadership role in establishing national voluntary standards for cadmium and other heavy metals in jewelry. FJATA, together with representatives from the CPSC, consumer organizations, testing laboratories and other industry stakeholders, are working to develop the first voluntary safety standard for children’s jewelry through ASTM International. While FJATA believes that EN-71 provides a good starting point to establish a national standard for migratable cadmium in jewelry, just as it does for surface coatings of toys, our industry is not stopping there. FJATA research will help determine the migration rates of cadmium in jewelry components under EN-71-3 as well as other test conditions. We continue to evaluate the methods and approaches used under EN-71 and also those under consideration by the CPSC as part of our standards initiative, and to explore the relationship between total and migratable content.

Conclusion

FJATA is the only proactive trade association working to provide the science, conduct peer reviews, and educate policymakers and the media on the facts: cadmium is not being widely substituted for lead in jewelry and we do not see adverse health effects in either children or adults from the presence of cadmium at traditional low levels that have existed for decades. Many of our members have been voluntarily testing for cadmium and other heavy metals based on international standards for some time.

Our industry has experienced first hand the problems that adoption of total content limits divorced from risk assessment considerations impose: they result in bans of safe products or materials. For example, crystal cannot be used in children’s jewelry because it exceeds the new national total content limits, even though data illustrates that less exposure to lead is associated with accidental ingestion of crystal than may be the case with materials that meet total content limits. Similarly, limits on total nickel content in jewelry resulted in an inadvertent ban on stainless steel; EU requirements to limit exposure to this potentially allergic substance had to be revised to avoid a ban.

Currently, some states have been legislating without having access to adequate information which results in each legislature arriving at its own conclusion. States have not agreed on the age of children’s products or how to test and measure the metal to ensure safety. While some states have recognized that EN -71 offers an accepted, globally recognized method to achieve product safety goals, other states have adopted often arbitrary total content limits.

Cadmium State Legislation as of August 2010

Product safety standards must be national in scope, and based on facts and science, not hype. That is why FJATA is calling on industry to unite and join us in this effort to secure a national standard that is based on both sound science and technical feasibility. We are your voice. You can help this critical effort by joining FJATA.