China releases draft guideline for consumer goods 
On August 20, 2021, the China Consumer Goods Safety Standardization Technical Committee released the draft of a recommended national standard (GB/T) – “Guideline for setting limits of chemical substances in consumer goods” and started collecting comments. The deadline for submitting comments is October 20, 2021. The national standard, which was formulated based on the actual situations in China while referring to foreign regulations, will be applied to setting limits on the chemical substances content in consumer goods. The outline of the national standard is as follows.
Definition of terms
- Consumer product: Products that are designed, produced for personal use, including products components, parts, accessories, instruction manuals and packaging.
- Limits: The maximum allowable content of certain type of chemical substances in consumer goods, or the maximum allowable content of certain type of chemical substances which released from consumer goods into medium such as solvents, air, water, etc.
Procedures of determining chemical substances limits
- Collecting information
Collecting toxicity information, related information, acceptable risk information and usage status information by querying information from database such as IPCS, GINC, US EPA, ATSDR, etc., and conducting questionnaire surveys to customers and related enterprises.
- Determining reference values
Determining reference values by conducting experiments and research with referring to the limits set in current regulations and standards.
- Analyzing social economic impacts
Analyzing the impacts on consumer health, enterprise production cost, worker health, working environment, functions of products and etc.
- Setting limits
Based on the information obtained from the above procedures, setting the limits of chemical substances to maximize the benefits to economy and society and minimize the cost, in consideration of the acceptable risk of customers and impacts to industries and their tolerance capacities.
For the original text of the above draft, please refer to the following URL (in simplified Chinese).
https://www.cnis.ac.cn/bydt/bzyjzq/gbyjzq/202108/t20210820_51860.html
