Stories on how bad the situation is, and the need for saynotochina.org, just keeps on rolling in. Sunday’s New York Times started to give extensive coverage to the massive environmental degradation going on in China. (a free registration is required for their site). This will be the story for 2007.

To quote from the article:

its (China’s) pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe … that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party.

What it also poses is a long-term burden on the rest of the world. What happens there affects us here. Conversely what the US does affects the rest of the world too. We are all in this together we are finally realizing. Again from the article:

China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo.

In our local paper today there were three more articles on the problems with products made in China and the opportunities for companies that make things locally. Two were AP wire feeds but one was purely local. See It’s only natural Local toymakers see opportunity after recalls

What jumps out at me is the quote:

Alexander said of the recalls. “It’s something we’ve been saying all along… We’ve said these toys are not safe for kids. You might get a wood product made in China, but you can’t be sure if it’s an endangered wood or a toxic wood.”

The AP articles report how China is now blaming the companies that ordered the products “saying it was new industry standards – not poor quality”. But if it wasn’t poor quality, as if lead paint had been specified, then why is China having to “launch a nationwide safety campaign focused on food and drugs”?

Lets open up the discussion to try to address this. What should we mean by saying something is a “World Safe” product?

Some major themes come to mind:

Production processes

Sustainability

Environmental Impact

Labor

Now this is going to very quickly get thorny. In France it is illegal to require more than a 35-hour work week. In the USA there are compensation rules around working more than 80 hours in two weeks but you’re not prohibited. Other countries don’t even have a definition for a work week. Is there one right way? No. We can’t let this disagreement though stop this initiative.

We need to see what areas we can agree on or at least get some consensus as to even the right areas of concern. Even that may not happen (China does not seem to care about how its companies pollute. For a long period of time we did not in the USA but we eventually started to realize the long-term, negative impact and we changed. China knows of the long-term negative impact but refuses to effectively act.)

So, what do you think? What needs to be considered? What should be the standards?

So the idea is to create a site where people can report problems/concerns/suspicions they have with products.  Chinese products?  All products?

Companies can check to see if their product is listed, how many references, etc-bad news for them.

Lawyers can check to see where the gold is.

Consumers can look for problems to avoid, patterns of abuse, support from those in like circumstances.

No worry here.  The frenzy will fade but the underlying dynamic will not go away.  The problems in Chinese (and other countries) business practices are so deeply rooted, and widespread, they will continue for years to come.  There will be incident after incident because the systems that would prevent future problems does not yet exist.

The opportunity here is many-fold:

1. Identify Chinese companies doing harm.
2. Identify other countries companies, doing business in China, and causing harm.
3. Identify unfair labor practices.
4. Identify predatory pricing practices.
5. Identify products that are made in China-part or whole
6. Quantify what percenatge of a businesses products are made in China.
7. Identify :China free” companies and products.
8. Become a clearing house for information on bad Chinese products/practices.
9. Become a source to identify “good” Chinese companies.
10. Identify companies not manufacturing in China.
11. Analyze and discuss the impact of Chinese practices on safety, health, pollution, environment, US economy, World economy, the dollar, the Euro.

Identify abuses by Chinese businesses

Identify “bad” Chinese products. Identify “good” Chinese products. The site (and the name) need to allow room to grow-frequently in a positive direction. Already we are seeing the first rumblings of a much broader approach. Product safety, good companies, good practices, fair practices, world-wide.

Nice to hear the GoDaddy people thought our name was cool-I do too.

We need an area where people can:

(1) Check to see if a product they are concerned about has been reported as having a problem.

(a) If it has been reported, they can report if they’ve had a problem – we would gather description of the problem, the suspicious product, the place that they got the item, do they still have the item – if yes, then we may need to get a sample for testing. We will also need contact information (which we will keep confidential but need so as to confirm rather than have unsubstantiated rumor)

(b) If it has not been reported and they think they have a problem product, then they can create an incident report. World Product Foundation points would be issued to people reporting problems. If the problem is confirmed, then even more points. Obviously all such incident reports will have the information blinded but certain information would be published.

Basically this would help create an ‘epidemiology’ for product problems. We’ll have to research if there isn’t already something like this on the web. There might be some federal reporting but it also could be by sector (eg. autos). A similar system as to something I’m thinking about is what the Center for Disease Control, CDC, maintains. All health care practitioners and area health directors (county health departments typically but also large city health departments) report the presence of certain communicable diseases or even certain rare diseases when they present themselves. Because there is a central clearinghouse within the CDC, the CDC can see if there is a pattern emerging or an increase in rate of infection – sort of an early warning system. Maybe that’s one feature for our site is to be the ‘early warning system’ for product safety.

We can go through endless ‘full name’ web-site iterations. We probably should as ideas come into our head but the ‘idea’ I’d really like is the one where the idea can be come an ‘it’.

Remember Xerox? They defined copying. To copy something became to ‘Xerox it’. Now to search for something on the web you ‘Google it’ whether you actually use Google or not. There is often even an ‘eBay it’ to sell something on the web but this is not as generic. It does not mean sell something via any means on the web (where as ‘xerox it’ means to copy something whether you’re xeroxgraphy or some other technology.)

So what do we do? What is our ‘it’? Test it? Approve it?  Certify it? ‘It’ needs to be something that customers do. Maybe our ‘it’ is for consumers to ?? it in order to see if it is safe. Again, an ’empty’ name becomes a better opportunity to define or ‘fill the name.’ Yahoo and Google were words prior to these companies defining them. Apple is a fruit that had nothing to do with computers. We don’t need this answer today but lets let it mull over and maybe something will come to us.

We’re focusing on China but in reality what we need is a worldwide product protection. Maybe this needs to part of a bigger effort – a part of the World Product Forum or World Product Foundation – products that are made with world product practices.

Practices need to include:

Worker context

Environmental context

End-user context

Other?