This annual report details notifications of dangerous non-food products from across the EU and summarizes the actions taken by the authorities.
The European Union’s Safety Gate European RAPEX 2020 annual report, published last month, confirms a stabilization of dangerous non-food product alerts in 2020. A total of 2,253 notifications of unsafe products were made by the national authorities last year.
Toys are, as in many previous years, the most notified product category, with 27% of notifications, followed by motor vehicles (21%) and electrical appliances and equipment (10%).
The three most common risks notified are injuries, chemical risk and choking.
Source: EU Rapid Alert System factsheets 2020; the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers- Directorate Consumers
Not surprisingly, 9% of all alerts raised in 2020 concerned products related to COVID-19, mostly face masks and disinfectants containing toxic chemicals.
Due to the pandemic, people bought significantly more on the internet. 26% of the notified products were sold online. In 2019 this was 16%.
The report states that more online marketplaces have joined the Product Safety Pledge initiative. In doing so they agree to check products recalled on the EU Safety Gate and remove them from their platforms.
Finally, the EU Commission announced in the report that the Product Safety Award edition will focus this year on two initiatives: protecting the safety of vulnerable consumers groups, and combining safety and new technologies.
SGS publishes the latest unsafe product notifications in Europe, US, Canada and Australia for free every week on its Product Recalls online platform.
EU & US statistics are also available quarterly in the company’s Product Recall Trends.
Both Products Recalls and Product Recall Trends are also distributed in SGS’s weekly SafeGuardS emailing.
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