Shopping online is convenient. In fact, it allows you to shop without moving from home, avoiding trips around the city and crowded shops. Moreover, you can often find great deals online. However, we must pay attention to what we buy, as some products may be dangerous for our health. In particular, we should be careful when buying toys, clothing and household products, which may contain toxic substances that are still legal in other countries.
The Internet is a double-edged sword. It’s certainly a great resource. But when a couple of clicks literally open up the world to you, the pitfalls are always just around the corner. This is true when searching for information on the net and especially when doing online shopping.
Shopping online is convenient. In fact, it allows you to shop without moving from home, avoiding trips around the city and crowded shops. Moreover, you can often find great deals online. And yet, many people still don’t trust online shopping, because they’re afraid of getting ripped off.
This fear is not only about the risk of fraud. Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation that lasted months, analyzing various types of products sold by e-commerce stores. They identified over 4,000 of them as dangerous, some with false safety certification, others, such as toys, without proper warnings about their use by children. Often low quality items are everyday objects that we would never imagine being dangerous. So let’s find out which products you should pay special attention to when shopping online.
Toys are doubly dangerous because they are used by children. They contain phthalates, additives that make plastic soft and flexible, but which are also endocrine disruptors. Precisely for this reason, they were subject to a restriction in 2009, which limited their concentration to a maximum of 0.1% in child products such as toys. However, this does not apply to all manufacturers worldwide.
This summer, the Danish FBR TÊnk Kemi raised an alarm. 1 in 3 toys for sale on popular portals such as Amazon, eBay and Wish contains phthalates beyond the legal limits. How is this possible? It’s because the products on sale online do not offer the same guarantees as those produced in specific country. Many of these toys, in fact, came from China, where safety regulations are not very restrictive.
The textile sector is also one of the most critical. Several clothes and shoes are treated with toxic compounds banned by the American and European authorities. For example, we are talking about some dyes that can release amines, carcinogenic, and hexavalent chromium, carcinogenic.
In addition, it has happened to find phthalates in baby bibs and bibs over the allowed limits, and clothing, shoes and accessories with traces of dimethylfumarate (DMF). This biocide is dangerous, because in contact with the skin it causes severe dermatitis and ulcerative lesions. These were of course import products, in most cases from China.
Finally, we must pay attention to household products. Some products from other markets, in fact, may contain asbestos. Although we know that this substance is carcinogenic, some countries, such as China, have not yet banned it.