Seoul authorities find Shein products contain high levels of toxic chemicals | Hacker News Reader

Seoul authorities find Shein products contain high levels of toxic chemicals

lemonde.fr

100 pointswslh31 comments

> In the latest round, they selected eight products sold by Shein, including children's shoes, leather bags and a belt and found several to contain high amounts of phthalates – chemicals used to soften plastics. One pair of shoes contained 428 times the permitted levels of phthalates – the highest observed so far during the Seoul inspections – and three bags had amounts as high as 153 times the limit, the city government said.

That's not great.

>So far, Seoul authorities have said they have inspected 93 products and found that almost half of them contained toxic substances. These items include children's watches and coloring pencils.

Shien's now on the blacklist as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't want anything like that around kids...

We’re decades into the pattern. I continue to be stunned that anyone is surprised by Chinese product anymore.

Here’s a rule that will not serve you poorly for the indeterminate future: avoid it all costs whenever and wherever you can. It’s never steered me wrong, the discounts were never worth it.

It’s not just Chinese products. In the US we’ve got the agency tasked with protecting consumers so thoroughly captured that they are forging test results to protect the companies polluting our environment.[0] This is a much deeper and more systemic problem.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/28/...

ok but this isnt phthalates related like whats in the article. but if your talking about just in general then i would say america is pretty strict at inspections in many fields especially compared to china. would say standards are just different

> We’re decades into the pattern. I continue to be stunned that anyone is surprised by Chinese product anymore.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it is "narrative based" thinking. This type of thinking typically associates a country's manufacturing with low quality products based on news and stories, but not a truth-seeking mental model.

In my opinion, a better mental model is this: Chinese manufacturing is a system. It a capitalistic system that can manufacture at any level of quality and price point. It is also libertarian in that there are fewer rules/regulations.

Quality is often proportional to price point, and many of the products on Chinese e-commerce sites are manufacture-on-demand (often low lead times) at very low price points. What kind of quality can you expect for $3-$4?

On the other hand, if you are willing to pay for high-end manufacturing that is highly compliant with standards, you will get the level of quality you expect. Apple seems to have no problem with the quality of Chinese manufacturing.

The system will produce what people are willing to pay for.

One of the problems here is that we're essentially chasing the tail on toxic chemicals.

When one chemical gets banned, it gets replaced by a slightly different form of the same chemical. When Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) was banned due to its toxicity, it was replaced by other phthalate compounds like Di-isononyl phthalate (DINP) or Di-isodecyl phthalate (DIDP).

We then spend years researching the next revision, only to find out it's toxic as well, leading to another ban or regulation and the cycle continuing.

Instead of maintaining a blacklist of banned chemicals, maybe we should have a whitelist of chemicals that are allowed to be imported/present in products. The situation is complex though because it's difficult to enforce.

> A Shein spokesperson told AFP the company "takes product safety very seriously." The company requires its suppliers to comply with its controls and standards, and works with international third-party testing agencies to ensure compliance with product safety standards, it said. "Upon learning of any claim against our products, we immediately remove the product(s) from our site as a matter of caution whilst conducting our investigations," it said, adding it takes appropriate follow-up action "if non-compliance is verified."

If they took product safety seriously, they would only sell products they had already verified to be safe, not wait for a "claim" to investigate and (maybe) pull the products.

Amazon is exactly the same I'm sure. That's why I would never buy food, cosmetics, or toys there.

How many of these exact same products from the same factories are also being sold on other marketplaces like Amazon?

Every Amazon choice product or top sponsored result these days is a product that can cause children to be exposed to toxic chemicals via inhalation, ingestion or dermal.

Some Chinese entity creates 100 shell companies with randomly generated names, and them register multiple variations of the same product on Amazon through those companies. They spam the first pages of results and bury all the competition outside the first result pages.

People buying those products just because of their price or because they are on Amazon are complete chumps. Those products are NOT safe to use.

I'm surprised it took this long for anyone to notice. Maybe that's naive of me. I'd have expected many product safety organizations would be testing products.

Sounds like weekly tests, not sure for how long though. Do you have more information suggesting it’s been happening for longer?

> South Korea – where Seoul authorities have been conducting weekly inspections of items sold by platforms including Shein, Temu and AliExpress.

I mean, most western governments have consumer product safety organizations that exist for this reason (and all of which have existed longer than Shein), so I'd have expected that they would have been doing testing this whole time. I think it would be remarkable if the unsafe products were an extremely recent phenomenon.

Don’t you mean SNL authorities?

https://youtu.be/MKTN2OiR2R8?si=FXeLzKUI9gO-J4ci

Kinda surprised this made the front page; we’ve had Amazon cloth pencil cases contaminated by lead, random drop shipping ultra cheap goods sure would seem suspect.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90347745/amazon-agrees-to-remove...

Hadn't seen that! But given how Amazon works, what's to prevent sketchy sellers from just putting their school supplies in another category like gardening tools or automotive repair or something? It's not like amazon's metadata is useful or enforced to any degree.

I am pretty sure if we started analyzing products in dollar stores or whatever we would also find those levels of phthalates. It's all coming from the same factories...

Shein sells cheap, "fast fashion" goods. They had a few pop up stores here in Singapore, selling what looked like low end knockoffs, albeit at low prices. They're selling tops and dresses for anywhere between $4.95 and $12 (Singapore dollars). I'm sure that toxic chemical safety is at the top of their list, selling at those prices.

I remember hearing about them in their early days when they were called "ZZKKO" like yet another of those random sounding shopfronts flooding amazon and peddling junk. Their mobile app looks and works pretty much the same as the other Chinese owned marketplaces like Lazada or Shopee.

Their founder appears to be following a similar trajectory too, moving from China to Singapore with a permanent residency, like the founder of Shopee. I think the Shopee founder is now a Singapore citizen. Not that there's anything wrong, this seems to be a common pattern on the Silk Road these days.

Kind of a tangent, but kind of interesting is when you walk in to Supermarkets and places that sell household goods in countries in East Asia, except Japan, is the smell of chemicals coming from things like sandals, shoes, patio goods, etc. It's overwhelming to me, but locals seemed nonplussed.

Sorry to be that guy, but nonplussed means something like "so taken aback, you're dumbstruck." Maybe you meant this, but more often people mean the opposite because of the "non" suffix [edit: prefix].

Anyway, you can smell the bad chemicals in plastics? I've never thought about it, but you're right there is a certain smell.

The Oxford American Dictiory says that it can also mean unperturbed, so it goes both ways apparently.

Nonplussed can mean either, just discussed here a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197346

That has not been in experience in South Korea. There is a pretty strong bias against noxious smells.

That'll be the formaldehyde.

Walk into a big lots or harbor freight here in the US, it’s the same thing. It’s a crazy intense smell, I know exactly what you are talking about. My wife thinks I am crazy, but it’s the same smell at most low price straight from china goods stores.

this is a clickbait title; it should clarify that the 'toxic chemicals' are just phthalates, also known as the new car smell, and that korea has recently reduced their permitted levels of phthalates to unjustifiably low levels

The "chemicals bad" paranoia is the current era's equivalent to the fear of microwave ovens or RF emissions.

to be fair, many chemicals are in fact bad, and, like flax seeds, phthalates may well be endocrine disruptors to the humans, as the article says. but it probably behooves life forms that are literally made out of chemicals to learn to distinguish between good chemicals and bad ones, and in particular to distinguish things that are likely to kill them from things that definitely won't. phthalates in baby toys definitely won't kill you

The reduced allowed amount of phthalates (DEHP, DBP) in Korea is identical to the allowed amount in EU and US. (0.1% by combined weight)

To be precise, they are only restricted on certain products like children's toys and clothing, which is the product found to be problematic.

i suppose i could have said that korea, the eu, and the usa have recently reduced their permitted levels of phthalates to unjustifiably low levels, but given the fact that we're talking about products made in prc for export to south korea, the other random jurisdictions in the list hardly seem relevant

this is a [potentially] misleading comment; it should clarify that the senses like smell are just defenses, also known as a survival mechanism, and ... I'll stop :)

Elemental analysis on the iPhone 20 please.

Innocuous elements can be arranged into dangerous compounds. To give the simplest example, carbon monoxide.

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