Since 1996, there have been at least 285 incidents of child strangulation by window covering cords. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a regulation to address this issue, and we recently submitted public comments on the Commission’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking. We offered a number of suggestions for improving upon the Commission’s preliminary analysis of the costs and benefits of eliminating cords from window coverings. These included recommendations that the Commission consider the prevention of parental grief as an unquantified benefit of regulation and that it perform separate cost-benefit analyses for each major category of covering (e.g., vinyl blinds, wood blinds, roman shades).
Our comments are available here.