NUREMBURG, GERMANY (dpa) – Karl-Heinz Hieronymus is not a maniac: he just rips up teddy bears and burns their fur for a living.
When the friendly-faced man with the soft Frankish-accented German stretches those cute stuffed animals onto the metal rack he is only doing his job and helping to save children’s lives at the same time.
As harmless as some dolls and teddy bears might look, they often carry hidden dangers for the youngsters playing with them, said Hieronymus, who works for the product testing department of Germany’s southern Bavaria state.
The Nuremburg-based organization monitors the safety of toys and is one of the largest of its kind in Europe.
Toys can be fatal. Kids often pull off parts of toys and swallow them, which can lead to suffocation. The European Union has agreed on standards which dictate that parts of toys have to be attached firmly enough to withstand a pulling force of nine kilograms.
Metal arms, like something straight out of a medieval torture chamber, are attached to teddy bears’ faces. Then technology takes over: a high-tech computer-controlled machine measures how much pulling about they can take before falling apart.
Things get even worse for the teddy bears. Before toys earn the initials “CE,” which stand for “Conformite Europeenne” and means they are safe to go on sale, Hieronymus sets the toys on fire to check whether “flames spread less than the norm of 30 millimetres per second,” as he put it drily. Teddy fur is not supposed to burst into flames.
Heavy weights are dropped on plastic toys too to see if they can take the strain or give off potentially dangerous splinters.
Violence rules OK when it comes to testing toys. In another part of the lab chemist Rosemarie Kupfer cuts rubber ducks into pieces and dissolves them in acid.
“We simulate the conditions in the stomach and look for traces of toxic metals,” Kupfer said.
Toys get a breather of sorts in the electrical engineers’ lab. Here the testers find out if the radio signals of remote-controlled cars interfere with television remote control handsets. They also check whether toy cellphones are compatible with microwave ovens.
The list of tests seems never-ending. It can take up to four weeks for a toy to pass all the sections.
For the manufacturers that doesn’t come cheap either. Depending on the nature of the tests, they can cost up to 3,600 American dollars. The Bavarian organization says it tries to work as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
Working closely with clients is becoming more important, said Brunner. Within the European Union the competition is getting tougher, even in the testing labs.
