This from yesterday's Washington Post article about a sweeping new European Union law that will require testing of products considered possibly harmful:

In the United States, laws in place for three decades have made banning or restricting chemicals extremely difficult. The nation's chemical policy, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, grandfathered in about 62,000 chemicals then in commercial use. Chemicals developed after the law's passage did not have to be tested for safety. Instead, companies were asked to report toxicity information to the government, which would decide if additional tests were needed.

In more than 30 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has required additional studies for about 200 chemicals, a fraction of the 80,000 chemicals that are part of the U.S. market. The government has had little or no information about the health hazards or risks of most of those chemicals.

The story is here.

We don't test "old products" in new ways because they're grandfathered in. We don't pull products from shelves that might be deemed unsafe, since what were supposedly governmental regulatory agencies now "ask" or "suggest" that the products be pulled, making it "voluntary."

So they discount the suspect products on the dollar stores' and big-box retailers' shelves, ship the remainder to our foreign, poorer neighbors, where we can study the effects of the possibly carcinogenic or harmful chemicals on our nation's or the world's poor.

It was a great system for maximizing profits, but that new EU law might really hurt that bottom line.