Noise Producing Toys and the Efficacy of Product Standard Criteria to Protect Health and Education Outcomes

Stuart J. McLaren, Wyatt H. Page, Lou Parker and Martin Rushton
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Stuart J. McLaren: College of Health, Massey University, P.O. Box 756, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
Wyatt H. Page: College of Health, Massey University, P.O. Box 756, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
Lou Parker: Measurement and Product Safety Service, Consumer Affairs, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, P.O. Box 1473, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
Martin Rushton: Measurement and Product Safety Service, Consumer Affairs, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, P.O. Box 1473, Wellington 6140, New Zealand

IJERPH, 2013, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: An evaluation of 28 commercially available toys imported into New Zealand revealed that 21% of these toys do not meet the acoustic criteria in the ISO standard, ISO 8124-1:2009 Safety of Toys, adopted by Australia and New Zealand as AS/NZS ISO 8124.1:2010. While overall the 2010 standard provided a greater level of protection than the earlier 2002 standard, there was one high risk toy category where the 2002 standard provided greater protection. A secondary set of toys from the personal collections of children known to display atypical methods of play with toys, such as those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), was part of the evaluation. Only one of these toys cleanly passed the 2010 standard, with the remainder failing or showing a marginal-pass. As there is no tolerance level stated in the standards to account for interpretation of data and experimental error, a value of +2 dB was used. The findings of the study indicate that the current standard is inadequate in providing protection against excessive noise exposure. Amendments to the criteria have been recommended that apply to the recently adopted 2013 standard. These include the integration of the new approaches published in the recently amended European standard (EN 71) on safety of toys.

Keywords: noise; toy safety; autism; ISO standards; consumer products (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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