When buying a variety of products, you may have noticed a strange icon in the form of a black and white shamrock. Something a bit like this: ⚜ It is matching signand.
Along with it you can sometimes see two capital letters CE. It is also a sign of compliance only with European requirements, not Ukrainian.
You may have found a document such as declaration of conformity.
All these marks and documents are part of the procedure for confirming the conformity of the goods to safety requirements.
The state develops and approves sets of requirements for certain industrial goods and determines the procedures for verifying compliance with such requirements. Such documents are called technical regulations. There are quite a lot of them.
For example, the Technical Regulation on the Safety of Toys contains requirements for the materials from which toys are made, a list of information and warnings to be applied to labels, etc.
Conformity testing procedures are also different. Somewhere the manufacturer simply declares that his product is safe and declares it, for some products he needs to be tested in special laboratories for such a statement.
Once entrepreneurs start selling these goods, the authenticity of their declarations of safety of such non-food products can be checked by the controlling body. Such inspections are called market surveillance.
If the seller is unable to confirm the safety of its products, it will be fined and the goods may be confiscated.
Moreover, the supervisory authority may inspect the entire supply chain of such goods up to the manufacturer or importer of these goods. Manufacturers have the greatest responsibility, because they were primarily obliged to ensure product quality.
Interestingly, if the company can not confirm where it purchased the product, then such a company is considered a manufacturer. Therefore, keep the shipping documents.
More details on inspections and fines read here.
