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EU Commission approves new harmonised standards for toys

august 2018- Relevant for: toys and children's products

On 10 August 2018, the European Commission approved new harmonised standards under Toy Safety Directive 2009/48/EC. This publication 2018/C 282/02¹, issued on the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), updates the toy standards EN 71-1, EN 71-3, EN 71-7, EN 71-8 and EN 71-14 to the latest versions and provides the transitional period for current harmonised standards.

Toys which are in conformity with harmonised standards, the references of which have been published in the OJEU, shall be presumed to be in conformity with the requirements in toy directive. The updated harmonised standards are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Updated harmonised standards for toys

The upcoming migration limits of lead under toy directive, which will take effect from 28 October 2018, have been included in the standard EN 71-3:2013+A3:2018. There is also another new migration limit of Chromium VI² for scraped-off toy material and will be effective from 18 November 2019, but it is still pending to be reflected in the standard EN 71-3.

In the finger paints standard EN 71-7:2014+A2:2018, the maximum concentration of allowed preservative climbazole (CAS# 38083-17-9) is 0.5%. However, based on the opinion from Scientific Committee³, the Commission adopted a lower allowed level 0.2% for this preservative after the publication of the standard.

[1] OJEU publication of the new harmonised standards for toys, August 2018 

[2] The newsletter for EC adopts lower chromium VI limit in toys, May 2018

[3] SCCS opinion on Climbazole (P64) ref. SCCS/1506/13, October 2017