McDonald's, Cadmium, and Thermo Electron Niton Guns

An anonymous reader writes, snipping from a story at NPR: "'How did the Consumer Products Safety Commission find out that cadmium, a toxic metal, was present on millions of Shrek drinking glasses now being recalled by McDonald's? Well, an anonymous person with access to some pretty slick testing equipment tipped off Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) about the problem. Her office confirmed that somebody using a Thermo Electron Niton XRF testing gun found a lot of cadmium, sometimes used in yellow pigments, on the surface of the glasses. The source overnighted glasses to Speier's office last week, which then turned over the test results and specimens to the CPSC. ... By law, no more than 75 parts per million of cadmium is supposed to be present in paint on kids toys. Speier's office said the amount found on the glasses was quite a bit higher than that.' Seems like the answer to a previous question about at-home science — this blogger seems to have been one of the anonymous sources."

Comments

Home Science?

[ReneeJade]

Doesn't it seem more likely that the original discoverer worked in a different professional lab, rather than having that sort of equipment at home?

Re:I'm betting

[MichaelSmith]

The glasses were made in China.

My wife works as an architect on small retail projects. One client of hers made a trip to China and bought a container load of material to fit out their project. So an electrician drills into a partition, hits asbestos and shuts the site down.

They lost a lot of money trying to save money on partitions. The funny thing is that the partition in question had stickers on it saying absolutely no asbestos. I guess there had to be a reason for that.

Re:I'm betting

[JWSmythe]

Unless you work for the company and can confirm they didn't use their Chinese manufacturing plant, it's still up in the air.

    the press release

Arc International is present in five continents with production sites (France, USA, China, UAE), distribution subsidiaries (France, US, Spain, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Japan) and sales offices.

    I'd suspect small production runs and urgent items are produced locally (or relatively locally). Large low cost runs with plenty of lead time, like McDonalds would want, would likely be produced in China.

Re:Anonymous?

[icebike]

Why?

Is McDonalds going to hire a hit man?

Why would the tipster contact an elected official rather than the CPSC directly? After all, they have a web page just for this process: http://www.cpsc.gov/talk.html

Was there some political motivation in going thru an elected official? Is this an insider?, a Competitor? Does it matter?

Re:I'm betting

[MichaelSmith]

Ah well I am an Australian and my wife is Malaysian. Most of her customers are asian and believe in always getting the Best Deal (tm). My mother in law needed a tooth removed and would have paid 500 AUD for the job so she flew to Malaysia (which she was going to do anyway) and got it done for ten bucks (our money). She doesn't need all that modern sterilisation and anaesthetics. Those things were obviously invented to trick smart people like her out of their savings.

In Malaysia once I saw this nice watch in a street market. We drove the price down from 50RM to 10RM. Then the vendor took the case apart to install a battery. I realised later that he just put the 10RM movement in. We weren't really bargaining, just choosing.

I am sure the warning was in Engrish. The shipment should have been flagged in customs, but its not hard to get lucky there, especially if the paperwork from china looks okay.