A key challenge is the increasing share of products bought online from outside the EU.
The Commission, EU Member States and businesses are working together to ensure that these unsafe consumer goods are removed from the European market.
According to Vera Jourová, EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, the Rapid Alert system has helped coordinate quick reactions between consumer protection authorities to remove dangerous products across Europe.
She added that “two challenges lie ahead of us: online sales bringing products directly to consumers’ houses through mail and the strong presence of Chinese products signalled through the Rapid Alert system. I’m going to China in June to further step up our important cooperation with the Chinese authorities on product safety.”
In 2015, there were 2,072 alerts and 2,745 follow-up actions registered in the system. When one Member State posts an alert on the system, other countries can spot the product on their market and react to this initial alert.
Over 65 percent of Europeans buy products online and the number of online shoppers has grown by 27 percent between 2006 and 2015.
A new challenge is now to address the online channel, which also brings products from outside the EU through mail into consumers’ households that may not have been subjected to safety verification.
The Commission is working on further improving the Rapid Alert system to include this aspect.
In 2015, toys (27 percent) and clothing, textiles and fashion items (17 percent) were the two main product categories for which corrective measures had to be taken. These were already the most notified products the year before.
As far as risks are concerned, in 2015, the most frequently notified risk (25 percent of the total of the notifications) was chemical risk, followed by the risk of injuries (22 percent), which was at the top of the list in the previous report.
The most frequent chemical risks notified in 2015 related to products such as fashion jewellery, with harmful heavy metals like nickel and lead, and toys containing phthalates (plastic softeners which can cause fertility problems).
With 62 percent of the notified dangerous products coming from China, this country remains the number one country of origin in the alert system and is the EU’s largest source of imports.
To date, China has followed up on as many as 11,540 notifications and has been able to take corrective measures in 3,748 cases, but in many cases, tracing the source of the product remains difficult.