Blog

The press release issued by the European Commission on 19 April 2025.

Today, the European Commission has unveiled its annual report on Safety Gate, the European Rapid Alert System for dangerous non-food products. The report presents an overview of dangerous products notified in the Safety Gate in 2024. 4,137 alerts were notified last year – the highest ever recorded amount of alerts since the launch of the system in 2003. This increase in alerts demonstrates the growing effectiveness and trust in the Safety Gate system, as authorities are using the platform more often to report and address potential threats to consumer safety. The report also outlines the follow-up actions taken by national authorities of the EU Member States, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein to prevent harm to consumers and stop the sale of hazardous products.

Main findings

Last year, cosmetics (36%) remained the most frequently reported products posing health risks, followed by toys (15%), electrical appliances (10%), motor vehicles (9%) and chemical products (6%).

Chemical ingredients were the main cause of risk in almost half of the alerts. Dangerous chemicals detected included cadmium, nickel and lead in jewellery, as well as allergenic fragrances in body oils, and synthetic chemicals used to soften the plastic, for example in some clothing. 97% of the cosmetics notified were reported to contain BMHCA, a banned synthetic fragrance, which can harm the reproductive system and cause skin irritation.

Alerts registered in the Safety Gate system triggered a robust response from market surveillance authorities with over 4,200 follow-up actions taken to stop the sale of these products or even take them off the market.

Next steps

The Commission is working closely with national market surveillance authorities to prepare the first ever product safety sweep. A ‘sweep’ is a set of checks carried out on websites simultaneously to identify breaches of EU consumer law in a particular sector. The aim of the product safety sweep will be to check the products sold on online marketplaces on their compliance with the new General Product Safety Regulation to ultimately enhance the safety of products offered for sale online.

Background

The Safety Gate Rapid Alert System enables national market surveillance authorities from the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) to report and take action against dangerous non-food products, warning other authorities to take swift action. Safety Gate alerts cover risks to human health and safety, such as choking, strangulation and damage to hearing or sight, as well as risks to the environment, energy resources and property.

Following the entry into application of the General Product Safety Regulation in December 2024, a modernised future-proof framework is now in place to ensure the safety of products on the EU market. The Regulation clarifies that all products sold in the EU online or offline, must be safe, regardless of their origin. It guarantees a better enforcement of the rules, improves the effectiveness of recalls of dangerous products and provides for the obligation by businesses to offer consumers remedies when recalling unsafe products and a new tool for consumers to report safety issues, such as the Consumer Safety Gateway.

With the e-Commerce Communication, presented in February 2025, the Commission proposed new joint actions to address concerns arising from the surge of unsafe or illicit products entering the Single Market from third countries. The e-Commerce Communication foresees targeted measures, among others, in the areas of customs and trade, such as launching customs controls, consumer protection and the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts.

On 10 April 2025 the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement on the new toy safety rules. The new Regulation proposed by the Commission will ban the use of harmful chemicals, such as PFAS, endocrine disruptors and bisphenols, in toys. All toys will have a Digital Product Passport to prevent unsafe toys sold online and offline from entering the EU. The Regulation sets stricter rules on online sales and gives inspectors greater powers to remove dangerous toys from the market. This will ensure that imported toys are as safe for consumers as toys manufactured in the EU.

Since 2022, the eSurveillance ‘webcrawler’ application has supported national market surveillance enforcement authorities by detecting online offers of dangerous products signalled in Safety Gate. Each day, the application scans the internet in all official EU/EEA languages to identify reported dangerous products offered for sale to European consumers. The detected offers are automatically shared with the Member Sates’ enforcement authorities, enabling them to quickly trace the sellers and order the effective withdrawal of these listings. This contributes to harmonised enforcement actions and addresses the challenges of monitoring the online sale of dangerous products. In the past year, the eSurveillance webcrawler has processed nearly 4000 Safety Gate alerts, analysed almost 1.6 million websites, and identified about 5300 web shops potentially offering reported products.