Dell’s Recall Sparks Worry About Foreign Manufacturing Quality

The Kansas City Star (Missouri)

August 21, 2006

While the huge Dell recall probably does not raise new concerns about safety standards, it does underscore quality control issues at foreign manufacturing plants.

That's the assessment of Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Scott Wolfson in an interview Friday. The commission has increasingly grown concerned about quality control procedures at foreign factories, which can ultimately affect the safety of products imported into the United States.

Dell Inc. this week announced the voluntary recall of 4.2 million battery packs, 2.7 million of which were sold inside the United States. The Dell-branded lithium-ion batteries made with cells manufactured by Sony had the potential to overheat, posing a fire hazard to consumers.

"This is a case where the product did meet safety standards but had a quality control problem in production," Wolfson said.

He said the giant recall shows the need for the electronics industry to go beyond setting and meeting safety standards but "also have the highest level of quality assurance at the production site, because this is a highly sensitive product."

Commission officials have sought to form agreements with officials in China, where many of the lithium-ion battery packs were fabricated, to encourage manufacturing companies to comply with quality control measures that are standard in the United States. The commission has no control over quality assurance standards in foreign countries. And it has seen more recalls involving foreign-made products.

The problem with the Sony batteries was traced to metal contamination inside the battery packs. Jostling or pressure can cause the metal to pierce insulation and potentially cause a short, which can overheat the battery. In a few cases, shorts have resulted in fires.

David Yang, a spokesman for Sony, said, "Inherently these products are very, very safe." He said the actual number of incidents "can be counted on both your hands."

Yang said the metal particles are "impossible to eradicate." But how the packs are configured, combined with heat and electrical current, can cause the particles to move around.

An industry group is meeting in September to, among other things, examine ways to create industry-wide standards dealing with quality control.

Wolfson said the recall also underscores concerns for off-brand and after-market companies that make replacement batteries that don't have the redundancies the brand-name companies build into their products.

These after-market replacement products, which often claim to be compatible with large brands, are cheaper but often pose larger safety problems.