Should Builders Be Concerned With the Recent Recalls of Chinese Products?Buyer Beware?

The labels on two otherwise identical circuit breakers were different colors, and that looked odd to the electrical contractor who was installing them. A closer look revealed different words on the labels, too. So he sent the off-color item back to the manufacturer on the label, Schneider Electric. Employees there opened it and found that the color of the label wasn't the only part of the product that was off.

Over the past two years, Schneider Electric—the maker of the Square D brand—and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission have recovered about half a million of the defective circuit breakers, which turned out to be counterfeit and probably were imported from China—without Schneider's knowledge or permission, authorities say.

The problem, besides the obvious scam of passing off an inferior product for a legitimate one, was that the breakers didn't trip when overloaded, posing a fire and explosion hazard.

Nobody got hurt—at least nobody whose injuries can be pinned on the faulty fakes—but the incident raises the same red flag for building products that has flown over Chinese-made consumer goods since last spring, when authorities discovered melamine in pet food following the deaths of thousands of cats and dogs, lead paint on toys, and antifreeze in toothpaste.

"They are intertwined," says Travis Johnson, associate counsel for the Washington, D.C.-based International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition. "The lack of oversight, the lack of regulation in China has been a boon to the Chinese economy that has allowed them to turn into the manufacturing engine that they've become. … At the same time, it's one of the major reasons we're seeing the kinds of things we're seeing."

Not every Chinese-made product turns out to be a problem, of course. Many American manufacturers, including some that make building materials, confidently outsource product production to Chinese factories, where labor is cheaper and in plentiful supply. Also, Chinese makers of non-American products sell millions of items under their own brand names, including fasteners, hardware, and cabinets, to U.S. distributors without incident.

Even toy maker Mattel, which recalled more than 2 million of the toys whose production it outsourced to Chinese factories because they were coated with paint that contained higher levels of lead than U.S. standards permit, admits that another 17 million or so Chinese-assembled toys were defective because of a Mattel design flaw and not because the Chinese did anything wrong.