Of course, if you're buying on Amazon, who knows.. but you are very, very unlikely to have this problem with people who make pottery for a living (like local artists, or reputable Etsy shops)..
If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon?
And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.
Because many (most?) categories of goods are consolidated into an effective oligopoly of reputable brands, where these brands push competitors out of the market in basically every respect — in brand-recognition, in advertising payments, in number of reviews, in review score, in "link juice", etc.
So even when there are garbage Shenzhen e-waste products being marketed on the same website, in the same category as the thing you're looking for, you won't see them if there are real products to be had, because the first five pages are all the real products. (Unless you're doing very specific searches, using very unusual keywords that the well-known brands would never think to buy.)
This is why the experience of shopping on Amazon is a different experience than shopping on a site like Wish or AliExpress: Amazon has both the e-waste and the stuff from well-known brands, and if you stay "on the happy path" of using the site, you'll end up mostly seeing stuff from well-known brands.
The only time this falls down is when there are no reputable brands in a category. Such as in the category of kitsch stoneware. For those categories, Amazon and Wish/AliExpress become effectively the same site.
> And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.
I mean... most of the things I buy on Amazon, I'm not putting in my mouth. What's the worst a christmas ornament is going to do to me? Get glitter on the floor?
I do understand the cases you're referring to — electronics and such — but in those cases, there are import regulations that actually prevent things like "burns your house down" electronics from coming into the country, with actively-maintained blacklists of products. Some few dangerous items might slip through the cracks and get imported anyway (especially at first, in unusual+novel categories like "negative-ion wellness products"), but one email to US Customs is usually enough to get these things sorted out, and the whole category will disappear from the store the next day. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0)
Just search for anything on Amazon right now and you can see what I mean. I ran afoul of this when I needed a humidifier last year, but just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page
For example, if you search for a good mixer, you’re going to get reputable brands at the top like KitchenAid, Cuisinart, etc. Conversely, when I went to buy a pull-up bar last year, there were only Shenzhen knockoffs because there are no big-time players in the pull-up bar industry.
There’s probably a nice parallel to be made between this subject and first-party and third-party games made for certain gaming consoles.
Top results:
Hamilton Beach
KUCCU
VIVOHOME
Cuisinart
Vospeed
CUSIMAX
Aucma
This query betrays a certain level of naivety about the game theory of keyword-advertising.
Individuals who are shopping for a phone charger, don't tend to search for "phone charger." Instead, they look at the particular phone they already have, and decide they want a charger (or more likely, a second charger) that's compatible with it and guaranteed to make it charge as fast as it can. So they search e.g. "iphone charger" or "samsung galaxy charger."
We reductionist engineering-minded people might think "those are both just USB-A -socketed 5V1A DC switching-mode power supplies; and what do people call those? Phone chargers!" and so search "phone charger" — but that's a mistake.
The above individuals, because they're the majority, are what the brands are all competing over with their keyword-advertising spend. So when you search e.g. "iphone charger", Apple has paid to be there at the top; and the up-market third-party vendors like Anker who want to snatch your sale away from Apple have also paid to be there at the top.
But no individual is really just looking for an unqualified "phone charger", so when you search that, you get to see a page of stuff that nobody has paid Amazon for placement on; where instead, it's all ranked by how much scummy heuristic keyword SEO manipulation each listing can pull off.
(I say "individual", because there are institutional buyers who are really trying to buy unqualified "phone chargers", because they are buying them to install in e.g. hotel rooms, without any knowledge of what kind of phone a customer is going to have. So you might notice that there are some reputable brands in among these listings, but that the listings are for ugly unbranded flush-mount phone chargers, rather than consumer chargers. Commercial phone chargers, per se. Electronics that are components of a build, rather than standalone products.)
-----
As a tangent: the "happy path" for Amazon is actually all about browsing, not searching.
How do most people get to an Amazon listing? Not by typing words into Amazon's search box. For most shoppers, typing a keyword search into Amazon is done about as frequently as asking a clerk to help you find an item in a grocery store. And as with that flow, while it's certainly supported as a customer-service mechanism, it's never been intended as the primary item-discovery mechanism. Amazon isn't Google; they don't have a "so make a freeform text field for it, and let some ML find it in an index" view of the world.
Instead, people find things on Amazon mostly through these three paths:
• Searching a product category on Google, and then clicking through a paid keyword advertisement placed by one manufacturer that takes you to an individual Amazon listing for that manufacturer's product
• Clicking an Amazon affiliate link embedded in a review webpage/video, or as the target of an ad in Facebook/Instagram/etc.
• Clicking around on the Amazon website itself, starting on the home page; going into various "departments", looking through "Hot New Releases" and "Top Sellers", etc.
Approaching Amazon through any of these flows will land you on listings that somebody, at some point, paid to take you to. And that means that the category the listing sits upon is valuable, and is worthwhile to fight over. So in turn, all the "More items to explore" listings linked from that page will be that product's keyword-advertised rivals, trying to lure you away from the original listing.
The best way to shop for a humidifier on Amazon isn't to search Amazon for "humidifier." It's to search Google for "humidifier"; click through to a review site listing the best humidifiers (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-humidifi... ); click through the first Amazon affiliate link you see on that page; and then look at all the humidifiers that are fighting over your known-high-value eyeballs on that listing page. Try it! I promise you it works. (The speedrun version of this process, if you already know a popular brand of humidifiers, is to just search "[popular brand] humidifier" on Amazon. All that brand's rivals will also be paying to show up there.)
I guess you could just admit you're completely wrong about Amazon search rather than change the subject to Google search
Similarly, why should I trust Walmart to not sell similarly contaminated items in store? If Amazon can get away with, wittingly or not poisoning, their customers, then as history shows it is a short matter of time before their competitors cut the same corner.
https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso...
> Amazon has been selling thousands of products that have failed federal safety tests, including children's toys containing four to 411 times the safe limit of lead.
I am not aware of similar problems with poisonous products being sold through the physical storefronts of Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh.
However, if in fact Amazon's physical grocery stores are just as bad as its website, then you absolutely should not trust Amazon grocery stores not to sell you pesticide contaminated foods.
Purchasing decisions by buyers are probably not based on whether or not the seller produces pottery for a living. I'd wager price, convenience (fast shipping, etc.), size, and design matter far more to a buyer.
Here's how the mugs were selected:
> The five mugs chosen for this study were selected because they were found to contain lead in a screening-level assessment. Specifically, 24 mugs from the authors’ office were tested using an Olympus Innov-X Delta handheld X-Ray fluorescent (XRF) analyzer. Each mug was measured once with the XRF gun at its highest sensitivity setting, which required the tester to hold the analyzer over the mug for 45 s. The three mugs with the highest resulting lead concentrations (1,223 to 7,034 mg/kg) were selected for the present study. These mugs each had decorative elements and will be referred to by their predominant colors: Green Decorative, Yellow Decorative, and Red Decorative. In addition, two representative mugs were selected from the batch of office mugs baring the authors' company’s logo. These will be referred to as Black Logo1 and Black Logo2. All five mugs selected were in active use in the authors’ San Francisco, California, office environment, and were typically washed daily in an automatic dish washer. Four of the five mugs were purchased in the U.S., and one was purchased in Europe (Red Decorative). The mugs all appeared to be in good condition, with no obvious signs of damage or wear.
The types of mugs found in a standard office probably match the types of mugs many people have in their homes. Regardless, lots of coffee is regularly consumed in an office environment.
I believe the results of this study are a little more relevant than your comment suggests.
That sounds like an interesting toy. Pity it costs about $15.000. But checkout the video in this listing:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Xrf-Analyzer-Price-Ha...
You just point it at things and it says what are they made of. Magic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdfHVcU8U7U
There are some significant limits on what it can analyze, but it's terrific for learning about metal alloys.
That's true until having been poisoned suddenly matters more.
But laissez-faire and buyer-beware I guess. Who needs any safety regulations at all, when we can all live in a utopia where every purchase needs to be evaluated by every consumer for every possible way it could cause harm?
ASTM D-4236 conforming glazes will contain warning labels that clearly indicate that they are "non-toxic" or "dinnerware safe".
Of course, toxicity means that it pretty much isn't used any more, so alternatives have been developed. They're just harder to work with.
Shouldn't we assume all this mass-produced pottery found on the shelves of Walmart and Bed Bath & Beyond is being made as cheaply as possible?
I don't know about you, but the only time I see non-MADE IN CHINA pottery these days is used, at the thrift store. New stuff isn't generally coming from some domestic artisan who cares about poisoning their neighbors more than a bigger profit.
Also does firing ceramics in a kiln release even more toxic chemicals in the finished ceramic?? I’ve always suspected this was inherently creating some toxic byproduct from the intense heat.
Thanks!
Amazon clearly doesn't use a mater compiler either. They buy their mugs from people who make pottery for a living. Perhaps the distinction is different? Maybe people who make pottery for a living in the developed world? Or perhaps people who make pottery for a living at smaller scales?
When the focus is mass production it stops being a craftsman's job and rather becomes a calculated process designed to extract as much profit as possible with little regard for anything else.
It's not even a thing you usually find in stores as a hobbiest in the states.. if someone is using lead, it's going to be most commonly a cost cutting measure... Or for a specialist purpose