The folks at GoodGuide had to retract their statement today regarding their claim of unsafe levels of antimony and chromium on the popular Zhu Zhu Pet toy.  This is unfortunate given the general veracity of taking a full life cycle approach to assess products and services.  We hope that in the future GoodGuide will heed third party review of results prior to disclosure to the public.

Here’s the press release from GoodGuide:

GoodGuide Issues Correction About Its Toy Testing Methodology

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – December 7, 2009) – In a press release we issued on Saturday, December 5th, we published the results of our testing of chemical levels in toys and stated that certain toys we tested had antimony and chromium levels that exceed federal standards. Since issuing our release, we have learned that the testing methodology used in the federal standards (a soluble method) is different than the methodology we used in our testing (a surface-based method). Accordingly, while we accurately reported the chemical levels in the toys that we measured using our testing method, we should not have compared our results to federal standards. We regret this error.