Opuscula

Made in China
Worry for EU, too

 

THE UNITED STATES IS NOT the only victim of shoddy and dangerous Chinese exports.

Now, according to About Croatia, Most dangerous goods reach EU from China; internet poses growing risk

THE ARTICLE leeds^cq off with China again topped the list in 2015 for supplying the largest share of dangerous consumer products sold in the European Union, the bloc's executive announced Monday, while noting that the safety of products bought online posed a growing challenge.

The country has led the ranking ever since it was introduced in 2003.

The article cites an EU official as stating that 62 per cent of (Chinese) non-food products (were) flagged as potentially dangerous last year. .

Apparently food items - such as contaminated fish - are excluded from the EU risk alerting system since no food products were mentioned in the " About Croatia" article.

The site noted that when a Chinese product is determined to be dangerous, the Chinese government is notified. The article failed to mention if the Chinese DID anything to correct the problem.

In the United States people who were victims of China's drywall found they could not sue the Chinese government office responsible for allowing the tainted drywall to be exported to the U.S.

THERE IS A WAY TO STOP importing dangerous Chinese - and other - products: HOLD THE IMPORTERS RESPOSIBLE for product safety. To the best of my limited knowledge, there are no importers "too big to fail."

Importers could, and should, be legally bound to, at a minimum, perform random sample tests on all imported products. When an exporter has a bad reputation, such as China, the sample rate is high (1 in 10); an exporter with a good safety record would have a low (1 in 10,000) sampling rate. All products in the batch with those failing the sampling would be destroyed* and the importer absolved of any damages claimed by the exporter. Shipping products back to the exporter simply allows the exporter to redirect the dangerous product elsewhere; destroying the dangerous product prevents this while proving costly to the exporter.

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* If, for example, a lot of 50,000 items is sampled at any ratio and the sample fails, all 50,000 items would be destroyed with no compensation due to the exporter for the destroyed items. Even for the Chinese, the "bottom line" IS the bottom line.