CPSC Announces Hearing for 2001 Petition on Mandatory ASTM Standard for Cigarette and Other Lighters
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has announced that it will be conducting a public meeting on September 14, 2004 in order to receive comments concerning a petition (CP 02-1) it received in November 2001 requesting that the CPSC adopt American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) F-400 as a mandatory standard for cigarette lighters.
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(In November 2001, the Lighter Association (an organization of U.S. lighter manufacturers and distributors) petitioned the CPSC to institute a rulemaking to adopt ASTM F-4001 as a mandatory consumer product safety standard under sections 7 and 9 of the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA). In its petition, the Lighter Association argued that ASTM F-400 has the force and effect of law in Canada and Mexico, but that because it is only a voluntary standard in the U.S. and is therefore not enforced by the CPSC, millions of lighters that fail to comply with it enter the U.S. market every week, particularly from China and other Asian countries.
The Lighter Association's petition also stated that ASTM F-400 sets forth safety criteria or tests regarding: flame control and flame height adjustment; spitting, sputtering, or flaring; flame extinction; ability to withstand being dropped; ability to withstand extended burning time and temperature; internal pressure or volumetric displacement; fuel leakage resulting from refilling (if applicable), etc. (The CPSC's current mandatory consumer product safety standard on certain disposable and novelty cigarette lighters (16 CFR Part 1210) only requires such lighters to meet certain child-resistance criteria.))
Staff recommends CPSC deny petition. According to the CPSC, after reviewing the petition, comments, and other relevant available information, the CPSC staff forwarded a briefing package to the Commission that recommends that the Lighter Association's petition be denied.
According to the CPSC, the staff has concluded that the injuries resulting from malfunctioning lighters are relatively infrequent. (For the approximately 900 million lighters purchased by consumers in a year, the estimated risk of death from lighter malfunction is about 2.2 deaths per billion lighters and the estimated risk of injury is about 1.1 injuries per million lighters.)
Moreover, the CPSC states that the incident data do not provide sufficient information to determine whether the lighters involved in these incidents conform to ASTM F-400.
For these reasons, the CPSC staff has determined that it is unclear whether mandating the voluntary standard would actually reduce incidents and recommends that the petition be denied.
1Note that in the CPSC staff briefing package and the original Lighter Association petition, this ASTM standard is also referred to as ASTM F400-00.
- meeting on 09/14/04 in Bethesda, MD
- requests to make oral presentations/text of presentations due by 09/07/04
- written submissions due by 10/14/04
| - Rohit Khanna (301) 504-7546 |
| - Rockelle Hammond (301) 504-6833 |
CPSC notice (FR Pub 08/16/04) available at
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/06jun20041800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2004/pdf/04-18671.pdf.
CPSC staff briefing package available at
http://www.cpsc.gov/LIBRARY/FOIA/FOIA04/brief/standard.pdf.
Lighter Association petition available at www.cpsc.gov/LIBRARY/FOIA/FOIA02/brief/Lighters1.pdf