New Safeguards Against Lead in Thomas and Friends Toys, but Parents Wary

Oct. 29, 2007 — -- Curt Stoelting is a little bleary-eyed after enduring a 15-hour flight from Chicago to China, but the mission for the CEO of the embattled RC2 Corp. is important to his company's survival: to make sure the toys he has made in China are lead-free.

"I want to see it with my own eyes," said Stoelting, "so we can ensure parents that we're taking all the right steps to keep their toys safe."

The rush to produce Chinese-made toys for the holidays is peaking while U.S. toy companies like RC2 — battered by a rash of recalls — attempt to convince parents their products are safe.

"I would say we've added probably three of four layers of assurances and safeguards," said Stoelting whose company makes the popular Thomas and Friends wooden train sets. RC2 issued the first major recall of toys covered with lead paint this summer.

In an ABC News exclusive, we followed Stoelting to southern China as he visited his company headquarters and contract manufacturers for the first time since the recall to see these new safety measures.

"We had procedures in place before, but what we found was that people were cutting corners," Stoelting said.

Before the recalls, RC2, like other companies, received certification papers from factories and paint suppliers claiming paint was lead-free. Obviously, that wasn't enough, so the U.S. companies are creating their own safety systems. RC2 calls its "multi-check."

Now when paint arrives at a factory, it is segregated, in essence quarantined. "We are now testing every batch of paint and we didn't do that before," said Stoelting.

A yellow label goes on the can of paint when it arrives. A sample is taken and sent to an outside lab. If it passes tests, the can gets a green label.

"So, it's very clear to anyone in the facility what paint has been tested and is released for production," Stoelting said as we walked through a factory paint shed in the Chinese city of Dongguan. A paper trail of each batch of paint is kept, and date codes are now stamped on the toys made here.

"What we found in the first recall was that if we had a system like this in place in the first place, we could have isolated the problem sooner … narrowed the recall and created less concern for our parents." Stoelting said.

Like other toy companies, RC2 uses outside testing companies, but RC2 is doing more testing on its own as well.

High-tech X-ray guns, some of the latest technology, are being used on newly made toys. An RC2 employee used the gun to shoot X-rays about an eighth of an inch into a toy. The gun tests for more than a half-dozen heavy metals. A sample of red paint, which was responsible for one of the recalls, tests at 800 parts per million on the space age looking gun. The U.S. maximum allowable lead content is 600 parts per million.

It's been a difficult year for Stoelting and his half-billion dollar company, which makes 1,500 different products including plush infant toys and John Deere tractor toys. In June he recalled 1.5 million Thomas and Friends toys. Then, a second recall was announced for an additional 200,000 toys. If that wasn't bad enough, a toy train Stoelting sent to parents for their trouble also had to be recalled.

"It was terrible. It was very embarrassing for us. If I were a parent and it had happened to me, I would be very upset," he said.

To impress upon his Chinese managers what is at stake, Stoelting read a letter from a family in New Jersey. "The idea that a toy manufacturing company would put our child needlessly and carelessly at risk for lead poisoning is beyond comprehension," the letter said. Stoelting told the dozen workers he agreed.

Carol Harrison wrote that letter after sending back a dozen recalled toy cars. She had her 4-year-old son tested for lead poisoning. The tests were negative. Harrison is glad her letter was read to workers in China, but she's unconvinced.

"They kind of lost my trust and I don't know what they are going to have to do to win it back," she told ABC News. "I don't know what I'm going to buy him for Christmas."

We put the question of trust to the CEO. "My hope is that we'll get credit for doing the recalls. As painful as those are, it's still an effective tool for getting potentially unsafe products out of the hands of children," said Stoelting. "We've admitted that we've made mistakes. But we've also committed to ourselves and to the parents we serve, and ultimately to their children, that we'll do everything we can to avoid these types of situations in the future."

In a multistory building a half hour away, Chinese workers in white lab coats scrape some of the toys made for Stoelting. The lab is part of Intertek, a global testing company. The scrapped paint is broken down so its lead content can be checked. These labs have been flooded with toys since the recalls started. This is where the samples of "wet paint" are tested as well.

Some parents have complained to RC2 and other companies that sending jobs and production off-shore have contributed to the problem. Stoelting disagrees.

"I think wherever you manufacture, no matter how products are manufactured, there can be errors. And what we have to do as a company is make sure that we provide the safety net in terms of all of our tests and all of our safeguards, so that it won't lead to the types of recalls we've seen," he told ABC News.

And complaints by mothers like Harrison that profits are put before safety are dismissed by the RC2 head. "We will not compromise toy safety for anything. Because we won't be in business long term if we do that."