Zhou Jinfeng: Keeping Products Safe and Compliant is the Most Basic Element of Corporate Social Responsibility- 中国生物多样性保护与绿色发展基金会

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Zhou Jinfeng: Keeping Products Safe and Compliant is the Most Basic Element of Corporate Social Responsibility

2020/9/1 13:38:00 本站

Environmental protection organizations Toxic-Free Corps and China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) jointly released the latest report on August 26: “Safety Investigation on Chemicals Contained in Plastic Toys on E-commerce Platforms (Ⅱ) - Take the 3C Certification and Plasticizer Issues of Rubber Ducks As An Example”. This is the second year that relevant environmental protection organizations have been tracking and publishing a special investigation report on excessive plasticizers in children's toys. Although the overall plasticizer compliance rate of the selected children's toys—rubber duck toys has been greatly improved compared with the previous year, the maximum limit of individual products is still as high as 409 times. Excessive plasticizers in toys are still worrying.

At this online investigation report release conference, Dr. Zhou Jinfeng, the Secretary-General of CBCGDF discussed how to better promote the work of "removing toxic and harmful ingredients from rubber ducks", elaborated in depth in three aspects of promoting environmental public interest litigation, fulfilling corporate social responsibility, and implementing relevant administrative rules and regulations. The following is Dr. Zhou's speech organized for readers.

Some time ago, after everyone's hard work, we have done a lot of work in the field of investigation and research on "removing toxic and harmful ingredients from rubber ducks", and we have also initiated public advocacy and achieved certain results. After investigating and advocating to the public, what are we going to do? The first thing to do is to safeguard public environmental interests. So how should the public environmental interest be maintained?

The new "Environmental Protection Law" empowers us to represent the public to sue the polluters and those who have affected the public environment. Therefore, in the next stage, we will concentrate on researching and prosecuting manufacturers, operators and related e-commerce platforms that contain toxic products.

Because we have been working for two years to pay attention to rubber duck containing toxic ingredients exceeding the standard. Of course, this is also something that is worthy of our continued advancement and must be improved. Industrial civilization allows us to accelerate production and accelerate the provision of various materials that people need in life. The rubber ducks are a need, but the production and lifestyle of industrial civilization has proven to be unsustainable. The production and lifestyle of industrial civilization is currently Is facing a huge challenge.

Starting today, we should start ecologically civilized production and lifestyle, should produce products that do not contain toxic ingredients and meet standards, and should sell non-toxic and standard products. We should give priority to ensuring public environmental safety from now on . Today, the reason why I talk about this matter straight to the point is that we actually hope that we don’t have to do public interest litigation. I hope that we and e-commerce platforms, manufacturers, market supervision departments, and the public can truly create greater before public health or public environmental interests are harmed, we should do our work together to prevent problems before they happen. The current laws and regulations have in fact provided a series of strict standards and requirements for manufacturers, distributors, and e-commerce platforms.

Then, under the existing legal framework, everyone and all parties have an absolute responsibility, including e-commerce, to change everything. We often encounter situations where businesses that manufacture and sell substandard products have changed their platforms to continue operating after they have been closed. This type of problem is more difficult for social organizations to monitor and make them withdraw from operating substandard products. We have done a lot of hard work in the daily supervision, but it is much easier for e-commerce platforms. All online stores on e-commerce platforms are basically registered with real names, and it is easy to take measures to carry out front-end management on them. When e-commerce operators talk about their corporate social responsibilities, they often say that they have also done a lot of public welfare undertakings, but I think that safeguarding public environmental interests is the first social responsibility of e-commerce companies. There are many specific content of corporate social responsibility, including environmental responsibility, social fairness responsibility, etc., and ensuring the legal compliance of the products sold on the platform should undoubtedly be the social responsibility of e-commerce, and it must be done before assuming all social responsibilities. What should be done, e-commerce companies, manufacturing companies, etc. should first do a good job in safeguarding public environmental interests.

So, in addition to promoting relevant enterprises to perform their responsibilities, there is one more thing we must do seriously next, which is to further promote the effective implementation of stricter, more specific, and more effective administrative regulations.

Two years ago, we made a request that catering takeaway companies should not voluntarily provide disposable tableware. When we first made this request, the major domestic take-out platforms disagreed, and even some regulatory authorities felt that we were a bit too much. But today, we see that almost all food delivery platforms have achieved this change, and most local governments have also legislated this requirement clearly.

In terms of reducing chemical pollution and Internet detoxification, we will also do this in the next step. We hope to implement some specific administrative rules and regulations from the administrative aspect as well. This is an important part of the practice of ecological civilization that the relevant regulatory authorities should perform. In addition to these two tasks, the third task we have to do is to assist relevant departments in promoting law enforcement reports and supervision. Today, the measures or ideas I’m talking about that we are going to do are very strict.

The reason for mentioning this is because we hope that manufacturers, e-commerce platforms, regulatory authorities and the public related to rubber ducks should pay enough attention to this and hope to join hands with everyone and consciously work together to change all of this. We do not need to wait for litigation, nor for administrative punishment or compensation, so that we can do a good job of daily chemical safety control work related to public environmental interests. We have full confidence in this. In addition, in the past two years of work, we have carried out investigations and advocacy on the safety of rubber duck chemical composition. We also want to thank some related companies for their great support and participate in positive actions together to promote change. Therefore, today, in addition to publicly releasing this investigation report, in the future, we will continue to praise companies and institutions that have made changes in the direction we advocate. We are willing to praise products that meet the standards.

Of course, we will continue to adhere to our investigation, research and advocacy, and hope that our partners and all stakeholders in this field will take active actions. Only with our joint efforts can we advance the idea of ecological civilization and enable the development of products, economy, and environmental public interests. After this year’s COVID-19 epidemic, economic development has increasingly become an important topic. People have begun to pay more attention to employment issues and GDP issues. The issue of economic growth has been supported by governments and all walks of life. In this context, we also very much hope that e-commerce and chemical manufacturers will flourish, with good business and good efficiency, but we know that lucid waters and lush mountains will always be the first. Only to ensure lucid waters and lush mountains, protecting the ecological civilization can have a healthier, safer and more sustainable development. Therefore, in the production of rubber ducks and other products, the safety of chemical ingredients must first be ensured. Under this premise, we hope that the company and products will be well developed.

Now, we have seen a series of data, e-commerce, network and related product development data, all in a rapid development. However, the content of the happy and beautiful life we are pursuing today is different from the past. It is no longer a simple pursuit of digital growth. For example, it is not only necessary for children to have rubber ducks to accompany them, it is also insisted that the rubber ducks provided to the children meet the safety requirements of chemical composition, and are non-toxic, harmless, and friendly to human health and the environment.

Finally, I would like to thank Toxic-Free Corps and all the people who participated in this project, and thank all the people from all walks of life who care, support, and participate in our efforts to urge e-commerce to detoxify. We hope that starting today, we will continue to promote daily chemical safety. On the one hand, greater results can be achieved. Thank you all.

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