Friday, April 24, 2015

Toxic Chinese toys still flood Vietnamese market

Toxic Chinese toys still flood Vietnamese market

Ho Chi Minh City market monitoring officers have discovered yet more children’s toys smuggled from China that contain excessive amounts of several toxic chemicals.
The Southern Agency for Standards, Metrology and Quality sent samples of a children’s car toy made in China to the Quality Assurance and Testing Center 3 for toxicity testing, and the result is shocking, the agency said.
The battery-powered car with a code of MH9996M contains an amount of phthalate that is far higher than the allowed level.
The content of phthalate in the car’s wheels is 206,700mg/kg, 200 times higher than the 1,000mg/kg standard applied in the EU and the US, the test center said.
The chemical is commonly used as a plasticizer, but excessive exposure to it can lead to cancer and disorders.
Upon receiving the test result, the quality center ordered Toys Land 6, a store in Phu Nhuan District, to pull the product off its shelves and told its importer to launch a recall campaign.
“We have confiscated the cars from Toys Land, and the importer should recall all of them as they are very toxic,” Tran Van Xiem, the head of the agency, said.
Other Chinese-made toys, in the shape of cows, deer and ponies which children can ride, were also found to contain a level of phthalate that is five times higher than the limit late last year, but these remain widely available at toy shops around the city.
Violent toys rampant
The city’s market watchdog agency has recently busted numerous cases of smuggled and violent Chinese toys, actions that have uncovered loose management over the import of these products, and the light penalties applied to violators, said an official from the HCMC Customer Rights Protection Association.
Tens of thousands of violent children’s toys smuggled from China were detected and seized earlier this month following a surprise raid by the Ho Chi Minh City market management agency on the warehouse of a company in District 6.
The two-story house, located in a small alley on Hau Giang Street, was packed with 129 cartons of toys when the team arrived, officers said.
Each carton contained hundreds of toys in the shapes of guns, swords, action figures, and puzzles, none of which bear safety stamps.
As many as 50 cartons contained guns, and there were two cartons of swords, accounting for nearly half of the confiscated products, according to officers.
The products all originated from China.
In another raid on the warehouse of Pham Huu Tai in District 6, police also seized a huge amount of Chinese toys, including 2,000 guns, 200 plastic swords, and 80 kg of plastic bullets.
The toy guns are very powerful and can hurt children, a market management officer said.

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