State to step up lead jewelry probe in stores

State toxics regulators Thursday said secret shoppers would be expanding their search in 2008 for lead contamination in children’s and adult jewelry as well as metal studs used in body piercing.

The role of the secret shoppers in prowling dozens of stores this fall came to light this week when the California Department of Toxic Substances Control announced amid the busy Christmas shopping season that it had ordered 11 retailers to stop selling jewelry for children that contained illegally high levels of lead. The crackdown will expand to adult jewelry next March, officials said.

Also Thursday, the department added nine stores to the list of 11 cited in its campaign to enforce a new law banning the sale of bracelets, necklaces and rings that contain illegally high levels of lead.

“There’s clearly a need to do this type of operation, and we are going to continue doing it with children’s jewelry and adult jewelry come March,” said Gale Filter, deputy director for enforcement at the toxic substances agency. “We’ve got two primary objectives. One is when we find bad product, it needs to be taken off the shelves. And two, we have to find out who’s distributing and who’s manufacturing this stuff.”

Former state Assemblywoman Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), author of the new children’s jewelry law, said she was pleased that government regulators were proactive. “This will send out a message,” she said. “The public is very savvy on this, and I don’t think any store is going to want to be listed as having toxic jewelry.”

At the request of the Los Angeles Times, Toxic Substances Control released the expanded list of stores. Added were a Longs Drugs Store in Huntington Beach, a JC Penney in Westminster, a Michaels store in Glendale, a Cost Plus World Market in Glendale, a Toys R Us in Roseville, a GapKids in Huntington Beach, and Claire’s stores in El Centro, Vacaville and San Francisco.

The secret shoppers found a variety of items at these nine stores, including necklaces, bracelets, barrettes, earrings, rings and pins that contained levels of lead as high 228,000 parts per million, Toxic Substances Control said. The safety limit established by a new California law that took effect on Sept. 1. is 600 parts per million.

The added stores either did not return calls for comment or representatives were unaware of the enforcement action. Regulators provided a variety of conflicting stories about why those retailers’ names and locations had not been included in the original list.

Filter said his staff removed some stores’ names from the original list because their parent corporations were parties to a June 2006 legal settlement with the California attorney general under the state’s Proposition 65 toxics enforcement law.

The companies agreed to not sell children’s jewelry that had lead content exceeding the state safety cap. Some cited in the probe, including Macy’s and Gap, said they had removed from stores all items with lead content above legally acceptable levels.

Macy’s reported that it had ordered a halt to all sales as of Nov. 28. Macy’s in a statement said it “has been working cooperatively with the California attorney general’s office for the last three years to develop the new lead standards applicable to children’s jewelry in this state.”

The company said it had a policy against selling children’s jewelry with lead content above the state limit and had clearly communicated the standard to its suppliers.

“Any violation of our policies or contracts is pursued vigorously with our suppliers,” Macy’s said.

Gap Inc. pulled lead-contaminated necklaces from all U.S. outlets before Nov. 9, said Harrison Pollack, a deputy attorney general in the office’s environment section.

Gap spokeswoman Cynthia Lin said her company’s Huntington Beach store sold the beaded red safety pin cited by the state’s list with a lead content about 4 1/2 times higher than the permissible limit for children’s jewelry. Safety pins, she said, are sold as an adult product and allowed to contain substantially higher quantities of lead.

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marc.lifsher@latimes.com