The Seminar on Enhancing the Management of Child Product Safety has been concluded successfully on 30 Oct 2012 in Beijing. The government officials with multidisciplinary backgrounds from the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), the Ministry of Health (MOH), the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), etc., have attended the seminar and shared their opinions around the topic.
The associated director of the AQSIQ, Wei Chuanzhong, stressed that the AQSIQ took the management of quality of child products as a crucial task at present. Wei Chuanzhong affirmed the improvement of child products management in the past while he also acknowledged that this was far from enough.
The quality of the child products was proven to correlate with children’s life quality and health, yet due to the broad scope and complication in child products market, quality issues have never subsided. In the resent state supervision spot-check on 4 main categories of child products (toy, stroller, shoes, clothes), the AQSIQ revealed that up to 13% of the products failed to meet the national standards. The major problems were laid on the noxious material application and excessive harmful chemicals residue, especially in the children’s shoes and cloths products. The hazardous substances involved include inferior fiber, decomposable carcinogenic aromatic amines and free formaldehyde. This is in accordance with the recent fashion clothing scandal exposed by the NGO Greenpeace. According to the Greenpeace’s report, a number of cancer-causing and hormone-disrupting chemicals such as phthalates, aromatic amine and nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs), were found in the clothes manufactured by the leading fashion companies such as Zara and Calvin Klein.
Most of the hazardous chemicals mentioned above not only directly affect the users’ health, but also “contribute to toxic water pollution around the world, both when they are made and washed”, said Yifang Li, Senior Toxics Campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia. In this sense, the utilization of those substances may cause consecutive environmental concerns, which endangers our own lives and the future of our offspring.
Back to the situation in China, the “Chinese Children Development Strategy (year 2011-2020)” issued by the State Council and implemented by the MOH has clearly specified the need to “improve the national standard of child products” and “enhance the supervision of safety of the child necessities and facilities”. To achieve this significant goal, Wei Chuanzhong called in the seminar for inter-departmental collaborations between key responsible authorities as well as integrated renovation on the child safety issues.
