South Korea finds high levels of toxic chemicals in Shein products

Products sold by the Chinese-founded online buying elephantine Shein contained toxic substances successful amounts hundreds of times supra acceptable levels, the authorities of South Korea’s superior Seoul said Tuesday.

Shein, headquartered successful Singapore, has skyrocketed successful popularity astir the satellite successful caller years, offering a immense enactment of trendy apparel and accessories astatine stunningly debased prices.

This explosive maturation has besides led to accrued scrutiny of its concern practices and information standards, including successful the European Union and South Korea -- wherever Seoul authorities person been conducting play inspections of items sold by platforms including Shein, Temu and AliExpress.

In the latest round, they selected 8 products sold by Shein, including children’s shoes, leather bags and a loop and recovered respective to incorporate precocious amounts of phthalates -- chemicals utilized to soften plastics.

One brace of shoes contained 428 times the permitted levels of phthalates -- the highest observed truthful acold during the Seoul inspections -- and 3 bags had amounts arsenic precocious arsenic 153 times the limit, the metropolis authorities said.

Phthalates are wide utilized to soften integrative and are recovered successful thousands of products including containers, quality products and toys. However, they person been known for decades to origin hormone disruptions and person been linked to obesity, bosom disease, immoderate cancers and fertility problems.

Seoul metropolis authoritative Park Sang-jin told AFP that they person requested a removal of these products from sale, and said that since the metropolis began inspections successful April, astir platforms person complied with specified requests.

So far, Seoul authorities said they person inspected 93 products and recovered that astir fractional of them contained toxic substances. These items see children’s watches and colouring pencils.

Last month, the European Union added Shein to its database of integer firms that are large capable to travel nether stricter information rules -- including measures to support customers from unsafe products, particularly those that could beryllium harmful to minors.

Shein and Temu person followed Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba successful challenging Amazon, particularly by making inroads successful the US market.