Parcels despatched from China by on-line retailers corresponding to Shein and Temu will face strict new customs controls as a part of a crackdown by the European Fee on “harmful merchandise” flooding the EU market.
Brussels officers additionally urged EU lawmakers to section out the exemption on customs duties that’s allowed for parcels below €150 (£125), which allows overseas suppliers to promote low cost items within the bloc with out paying the tax.
The fee mentioned most of the billions of low-value merchandise that enter the EU annually weren’t compliant with its legal guidelines and European companies that revered the foundations had been dropping out to rivals promoting unsafe or counterfeit merchandise.
“We now have seen a surge in low-value merchandise offered by non-EU merchants offered by on-line marketplaces,” mentioned the European Fee vice-president Henna Virkkunen. “A lot of these merchandise, they’ve been discovered to be unsafe, counterfeited and even harmful, so they don’t seem to be typically assembly our requirements.”
Final 12 months, 4.6bn low-value parcels entered the EU, equal to 12m a day, thrice greater than in 2022. Greater than 91% of parcels valued below €150 got here from China, the place Temu and Shein make and dispatch most of their items.
In a coverage paper revealed on Wednesday, the fee mentioned it will work with nationwide customs authorities within the EU’s 27 member states to concentrate on unsafe merchandise offered on-line, together with stepping up market surveillance and testing.
The rise in low cost merchandise purchased on-line is growing stress on customs authorities, the fee mentioned. It known as on EU lawmakers – member states and MEPs – to take away the obligation exemption on imports priced beneath €150, in step with proposals from Could 2023.
“In response to the surge of low worth e-commerce imports, it’s important to finalise our customs union reform,” mentioned the European commissioner for commerce, Maroš Šefčovič. He additionally recommended European lawmakers impose a dealing with price on retailers to cowl the hovering prices of supervising compliance with EU guidelines.
The EU government is anxious in regards to the environmental injury attributable to the flood of low cost imports, from the air pollution concerned of their manufacturing and transport to the “critical challenges” posed to European recycling authorities, left to cope with low-quality, poisonous or exhausting to recycle merchandise.
It urged lawmakers to hurry up work on a draft regulation that might imply producers of textiles and footwear would pay charges to fund garbage assortment and remedy.
Temu and Shein didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
The clampdown comes after Donald Trump’s 10% tariffs on Chinese language items closed a authorized loophole that allowed China’s fast-fashion firms to ship items below $800 (£638) into the US duty-free.
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Frightening fury from Beijing, the US postal service additionally introduced on Tuesday that it was suspending parcels from China and Hong Kong, a transfer more likely to hit Temu and Shein. The postal service gave no cause for the choice, which a Chinese language authorities spokesperson described as “unreasonable suppression”.
Final October, the fee began authorized motion towards the Chinese language on-line market Temu over issues that it was failing to cease the sale of unlawful merchandise. The platform, which tells customers to “store like a billionaire” and sells all the things from garments to cooking equipment at low costs, has seen rocketing progress since launching in Europe in 2023.
The pan-European client group BEUC has raised the alarm about harmful merchandise offered by Temu: its members discovered kids’s toys that posed a choking hazard, electrical heaters that risked inflicting fires and electrical shocks, wrongly labelled sunscreens and cosmetics, and crash helmets that supplied insufficient safety. Temu mentioned in a press release that it took the BEUC criticism “very critically and can examine it totally”.
Agustín Reyna, the director basic of BEUC, mentioned: “If the EU is critical about defending customers and hitting the highway to decarbonisation, it should guarantee all people performs by the identical guidelines.”
