The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is the leading federal agency charged with ensuring the safety of consumer products. The CPSC protects families like yours from risks of injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products, including items that many of you use every day, such as cribs, strollers, sleepwear, and toys.
For the last two years, the CPSC has chosen to prioritize making the agency more open to the public and to families. In just a few weeks, the CPSC will launch its biggest open-government project. Starting in March 2011, CPSC will unveil a new publicly searchable database of reports of harm received from consumers and others relating to the use of consumer products. The database will be posted on the website SaferProducts.gov. U.S.PIRG supported the creation of this database and has provided valuable feedback during its development, along with many other CPSC stakeholders.
Before the database launch, CPSC would like to provide you with a sneak peek at one way the database will work for parents and other consumers. We want you to become familiar with how the database can be used to report a harm or risk of harm relating to the use of a consumer product or search for reports and recall information on products that you own already or may be thinking of buying. Knowing how to use SaferProducts.gov will help you gain access to important safety information and become connected to the CPSC.
We urge all PIRG supporters to click on this link to watch a video demonstration of the process for reporting an incident to CPSC. Please share this message with friends and family who you think would be interested. We hope you'll connect with us on Twitter @OnSafety and through our blog, which aims to answer your questions.
We are grateful for the involvement of U.S. PIRG and state PIRG supporters in the new consumer database, and we look forward to our continued partnership to keep children and families safe!
Written by Inez Tenenbaum, Chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Liz Hitchcock, Public Health Advocate with U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG)