The company has the option of doing it voluntarily, or the regulator can start the process of forcing a recall. Obviously there is less red tape required to fo

The company has the option of doing it voluntarily, or the regulator can start the process of forcing a recall. Obviously there is less red tape required to formally ask a company to consider a recall then there is in issuing an involuntary one. And yeah, there frequently are not legally binding regulations in many areas of product safety, because the CPSC is required to defer to industry creating its own voluntary standards. Only if the industry refuses to create good enough voluntary standards, or too many companies fail to comply and create safety issues can the CPSC create mandatory standards. Other regulators may not be as constrained here, but there is still a general culture of “government telling us what to do”=bad, so better for industries to get together and tell themselves what to do. Industry created standards can often update faster to changes in the risk landscape than bureaucrats can anyway.