AHFA Issues Statement on STURDY Act

April 29, 2019  by Laurie Northington in Business Strategy, Industry   

The AHFA supports a mandatory stability standard that holds all manufacturers to a rigorous safety standard for clothing storage furniture. AHFA welcomes and supports the CPSC’s recent moves to expedite a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for a mandatory furniture stability standard under Sections 7 and 9 of the Consumer Product Safety Act. AHFA believes CPSC should expend the necessary resources on this effort in 2019-2020 to ensure the goal is met.

According to AHFA, CPSC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking makes the STURDY Act unnecessary. Reasons include: 

• CPSC and its staff of consumer safety technical experts, working in collaboration with child safety advocates and technical experts from the home furnishings industry, are best equipped to identify the requirements of an effective mandatory standard;
• As proposed, STURDY mandates specific technical provisions that have not been clearly defined, researched, nor even shown to be feasible; and,
• Because the proposed technical requirements of STURDY are ambiguous, there can be no clear pathway to compliance, and this could render the resulting standard unenforceable.

Even without these critical flaws, STURDY must be passed by Congress before the clock begins ticking on the one-year window for CPSC to adopt a mandatory standard.  With appropriate resources dedicated to designing new testing protocol, an effective mandatory standard can be underway immediately … rather than potentially stalled in a long and cumbersome legislative process.