Safety standards must be enforced

A view of the new campus of Changzhou Foreign Languages School near a toxic site in Changzhou city, east China's Jiangsu province, 18 April 2016.

The symptoms recently reported by some pupils in a primary school in Beijing, for which the school's plastic running track has been blamed, has caused extensive concerns over the safety of such running tracks and the official's attitude toward this issue.

People are questioning why lessons have not been learned, since similar cases were reported in 15 cities across the country in 2015 alone. The public has also questioned why no effective measures have been taken to stop the widespread occurrence of such a safety problem since the popularization of plastic running tracks in China 10 years ago.

To people's surprise, almost all the plastic running tracks tested have conformed to national standards. For example, following the exposure of the health problems of pupils at a Beijing primary school, test results confirm the running track meets the national quality standards.

Aside from doubts over the objectivity of the testers, the test results have prompted calls for the national quality standards to be raised, as people are concerned that the tests do not cover all the toxic substances used in running tracks.

Following a public outcry over the safety of plastic running tracks as early as 2003, the Ministry of Education and the General Administration of Sport jointly organized an assessment of them and reached the conclusion that they are "basically harmless". But the problem is that the materials used by most schools for their plastic running tracks are not the same as those used in the samples sent to the authorities for assessment. In the absence of effective supervision, even the strictest safety standards cannot ensure safety.

China has only a few licensed producers of plastic running tracks, but there are now thousands of manufacturers. The effort to set up a free market should not mean tolerance of unlicensed companies and the lack of effective supervision. The value of any safety standards lies in their implementation.--Changjiang Daily