Toy "Dual Standards" Officially Land! GB 6675.1 and GB/T 46509-2025 Join Forces — Are Your Testing Reference Standards Ready?
In recent years, the "invisible killer" in children's toys (such as floor mats, plastic toys, and wooden toys) — volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions — has drawn increasingly high attention from all sectors of society and regulatory authorities.
To further strengthen the defense line for children's health, the state officially released two heavyweight toy national standards on October 5, 2025: GB 6675.1-2025 Toy Safety — Part 1: Basic Code together with six other mandatory national standards on toy safety, as well as the supporting test method standard GB/T 46509-2025 Determination of Volatile Organic Compound Emissions from Toys. The former will be formally implemented on November 1, 2026, replacing the 2014 version, while the latter has already taken effect simultaneously. This is the third major revision since China's first toy safety standard was released in 1986.
GB 6675.1-2025
GB/T 46509-2025
The implementation of these two new regulations marks the entry of China's toy chemical safety supervision into a more refined and stringent new stage. For toy manufacturers, third-party testing organizations, and enterprise QC laboratories, this also means brand-new testing challenges.
GB 6675.1-2025: Major Expansion of Chemical Requirements, Filling the VOC Regulatory Gap
GB 6675.1-2025 has substantially expanded the chemical requirements section, newly adding limit requirements for 10 categories of hazardous substances, including formaldehyde, decomposable harmful aromatic amine dyes, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, migratable N-nitrosamines and their precursors, formamide, short-chain chlorinated paraffins (SCCPs), boron, and TVOC.
This is content that did not exist in the 2014 version. In the past, VOC emissions from toys were in a state of almost "no limits to follow," and this revision directly fills that gap.
At a press conference on November 19, 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology publicly confirmed several key figures: the formaldehyde limit for key materials of toys for infants and toddlers under 36 months is ≤30 mg/kg; the TVOC emission limit is ≤0.5 mg/m³ (the first time this indicator has been proposed in a toy standard internationally); for viral "squishy" and "crystal mud" toys, the boron migration limit is ≤300 mg/kg; the number of controlled phthalate plasticizers has increased from 6 to 10.
GB/T 46509-2025: Defining Dual Test Pathways, Locking in 0.01 mg/m³-Level Precision Data
No matter how strict the limit values are, they are meaningless if they cannot be measured accurately. This is exactly the problem that GB/T 46509-2025 is intended to solve. The standard specifies two test pathways:
Bag method: simulates the VOC emission scenario of toys in a confined space (such as packaging bags and toy boxes);
Climate chamber method: collects air samples from the chamber under controlled environmental parameters such as (23±2)℃ and relative humidity (50±5)%, serving as the arbitration basis in case of dispute.
Both methods use thermal desorption gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (TD-GC-MS) combined with TENAX sorbent tubes for qualitative and quantitative analysis, supplemented by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for formaldehyde determination. The standard also defines TVOC — the sum of all organic compounds with retention times between n-hexane and n-hexadecane — as well as the precision requirements: the absolute difference between two test results of a single VOC component must not exceed 0.01 mg/m³, TVOC must not exceed 0.03 mg/m³, and the linear correlation coefficient of the standard curve must reach 0.995 or above.
CATO Reference Standards: Empowering Precision Testing Across the Entire Toy Safety Workflow
For the key test items newly added in GB 6675.1-2025 and GB/T 46509-2025, CATO provides reference standard solutions covering the following substances:
For more product inquiries, please visit the official website: https://www.cato-chem.com/