From explosive pressure cookers to electrocution from toasters and kettles — it’s no secret a defective kitchen item can be potentially life-threatening. Surprisingly, more than half of those items recalled in the past five years may still be sitting in people’s homes, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The ACCC reported that there were about 6.6 million products under voluntary recall in Australia as of October 2019, but annually only about half of the items recalled were ultimately returned. Not including motor vehicles, the ACCC said there were about 1.7 million recalled products still in people’s homes.
Consumer group Choice recently trawled the government website for kitchen appliances that have been ruled unsafe after sale, collating all the items from the past five years in a handy check-able list, to make sure you’re not putting yourself at risk.
The list contains 28 kitchen appliances that were recalled for a variety of different defects, which may lead to accidents or injury. The items are categorised into the danger they pose and include waste disposal units and food processors that may pose a risk of lacerations, kitchen scales with dodgy batteries, multi-cookers that may undercook meat, and a host of appliances that pose the risk of electrocution, burns or fires.
Amy Pereira, Choice product safety campaigner, says, “Product recalls have tripled in the past 20 years, emphasising the need for a law that requires goods to be safe before they go on sale.”
In November 2019, the consumer advocacy group called for the government to introduce a more “proactive approach” to product safety. Choice said their submission to the federal government aimed to establish a general safety provision based on the UK’s General Product Safety Regulations — which, simply put, would mean products had to be proven safe before they were sold.
Choice said it was a call they’d been making repeatedly in recent years because unsafe products on the Australian market “have a long history of causing injuries and deaths, even after they’ve been recalled”.
Choice said one of the issues was that recall notices weren’t always easy to find and may be missed, or often items would continue to be sold on sites such as eBay after the product recall. “There’s the problem of finding out about the recall in the first place,” Choice said.
“In a recent Choice story about a woman who was injured by her Aldi pressure cooker when it erupted and burned her over several parts of her body, the recall notification was not easy to find. The product was recalled in August 2017, but Giovanna Simonetti didn’t discover that until her unit malfunctioned and sent her to the hospital in November 2020. Before the incident, she’d been using the pressure cooker on a regular basis.
“And even when retailers do make it clear that a product has been recalled, it still might be available (without noting that it’s been recalled) on sites like eBay, as is the case with the Sumeet mixer/grinder that’s on our list of kitchen recalls from the past five years.”
The ACCC also noted an issue with some retailers not “being effective in seeking out affected products from the marketplace”. The ACCC said it had implemented new procedures to counter this issue in 2018, and were continuing to “refine the program”.
If you own any of the products identified in this story, you should visit the government’s product safety site here, search for the product by name, and follow the recall instructions. Buyers of recalled products are entitled to a refund from the store where they bought the product.