When Safety Is the Product

For six months, a shipment of 100,000 sleeping bags to a major US retailing company has been sitting in a US warehouse, held up because the paint on inch-long (25-millimeter) zipper pulls on the bags failed lead testing by 0.1 part per million over the limit. The company is trying to figure out what to do with them.

That is just one bit of the fallout ov…