Safety recommendation
It is recommended that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy develops a strategy to improve button/coin cell battery safety, to include producing a fast-track standard covering/considering battery design, product casing, packaging and safe retailing practices.
Response:
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) welcomes the HSIB’s report. Last year the Government created a new national regulator, the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS), as an office of BEIS, to take the lead in national product safety issues. OPSS is committed to delivering a trusted product safety system giving high levels of protection to consumers.
The PAS [Publicly Available Specification] is part of OPSS’s strategy to provide guidance and support to manufacturers, retailers and other stakeholders on safety considerations for common household items that use button batteries as well as when dealing with the batteries themselves. Whilst there is a legal requirement to ensure that products placed on the market are safe, OPSS recognises that this is an area in which more guidance would be helpful. Button battery safety is regulated under the General Product Safety Regulations, which require that they are safe under normal or reasonably foreseeable conditions of use. Some products, such as toys, are regulated with button battery safety aspects in mind. However, there are no guidelines on what constitutes safety specifically with regards to button battery use for many household items.
For this reason OPSS has commissioned the BSI (British Standards Institution) to produce a PAS for button batteries and household products that use them. A PAS is a fast-track standardisation document that defines good practice standards for a product, service or process. The new PAS will cover the life cycle of button batteries in consumer markets, from purchase to use in household products through to safe disposal. It will provide a guide to best practice for manufacturers and retailers of the batteries and the household products that use them with respect to packaging, product casing, labelling, and disposal to mitigate the risk of ingestion. The PAS recognises the risk that is posed by used batteries left in the house, and also covers the need for immediate safe disposal of used button batteries. The PAS also considers the marketing and packaging of button batteries regarding the security of packaging for each individual battery.
As the PAS sponsor, OPSS has set out the scope for the PAS to ensure that it covers all aspects of safety, including consideration of design, product casing, packaging and retail practices both online and in-store. The scope may be refined further during the PAS development process in response to comments received during Steering Group and public consultations. Membership of the steering group for the PAS include industry, retail, charity and consumer representatives from the Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), the British Irish Portable Battery Association (BIPBA), the British Retail Consortium (BRC), HSIB, the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT), BSI , the Association of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances (AMDEA), and techUK which represents the UK tech industry .
The PAS sets the bar in terms of level of quality that can be reached by all actors in the supply chain, with clear guidelines for those who choose to follow it. As a single source of all safety information relating to button batteries and products that use them, the PAS can serve as a resource for enforcement authorities and industry bodies including manufacturers and retailers to consult when determining whether a product meets the GPSR [General Product Safety Regulations] requirement that it is safe. For manufacturers, it will guide consideration of button battery safety in the design of household products that use them, and for retailers it will prompt consideration of safety in the choice of products to stock as well as ensuring that button batteries for sale are placed appropriately and with appropriate warnings, both in shops and online.
The PAS will be fully funded by OPSS to be free to download from the BSI website. This will ensure its widest distribution and use. The indicative timeline for the PAS development is 15 months from initiation to completion, and completion is expected in late 2020. The PAS will undergo review approximately 18 to 24 months following publication, which is BSI’s standard period of review for PAS documents.