(Bloomberg) -- Defects that caused Samsung ElectronicsCo.’s Note 7 phones to burst into flames last year revealed thatthe industry’s voluntary standards for the design and manufactureof rechargeable batteries aren’t adequate to protect safety, a U.S.consumer-safety regulator has concluded.

Lithium-ion batteries

The Consumer Product SafetyCommission, which negotiated a recall of 1.9 million of thephones and is conducting its own investigation, on Tuesday said ina press release that standards for lithium-ion batteries in mobilephones need to be updated.

Those standards were first developed in 2006 and haven’t beenrevised since 2011. The agency and Samsung are working with theindustry to "take a fresh look" at the voluntary standard forlithium-ion batteries in smartphones, the commission said.

More safeguards during design, manufacturing

"Industry needs to learn from this experience and improve consumersafety by putting more safeguards in place during the design andmanufacturing stages to ensure that technologies run by lithium-ionbatteries deliver their benefits without the serious safety risks,"CPSC Chairman Elliot Kaye said in the release.

The CPSC action has broad implications for the worldwide mobilephone industry, which sold 1.98 billion of the devices in 2015,according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

It is also the latest investigation to raise concerns aboutsafety in the increasingly potent lithium-based cells that havebecome almost ubiquitous in people’s lives, powering everythingfrom smartphones to power tools. In recent years there have beenrecalls of so-called hoverboard scooters, thegrounding of Boeing Co.’s 787 and a ban on bulk shipments of batteries by passengerairlines as a result of safety concerns.

“Standards need continuous improvement,” said Dan Doughty, aconsultant on batteries who formerly served as a researcher atSandia NationalLaboratories. “It’s going to be a constant struggle.”

The mobile phone industry follows battery design guidelinesdeveloped by the Institute ofElectrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., a nonprofit groupthat works with industry to develop consensus standards forelectrical equipment.

The IEEE guidelines cover design, testing and quality assuranceand are designed to limit “battery failure under multiplestresses."

IEEE didn’t respond to requests for comment on its work in thisarea.

While Kaye’s statement didn’t mention IEEE, it said Samsungplans to share what it learned from its investigation.

Need to modernize

“Consumers should never have to worry that a battery-powered devicemight put them, their family or their property at risk,” Kaye said.“This is why we need to modernize and improve the safety standardsfor lithium-ion batteries in consumer electronics and also stayahead of new power sources that will inevitably come along andreplace these.”

Related: Is your product recall covered? Probablynot

Samsung deserves credit for sharing its investigation resultsand offering to assist the industry, a “very rare thing” in thesecretive and competitive mobile-phone industry, Doughty said.

That competition is at least part of the reason for the recentfailures, according to Jim McGregor, a principal analyst at TiriasResearch LLC, which conducts scientific studies for technologycompanies.

"If you can’t ensure 100 percent that the battery is not goingto fail, maybe we need to design casing around it,” McGregor said.But right now, there isn’t casing available that would work in thespace-constrained smartphones, he said.

Dozens of reports

The CPSC reached agreement with Samsung to recall about 1 millionNote 7s on Sept. 15 two weeks after the company halted sales of thephones following dozens of reports of them catching fire orexploding. After replacement batteries had similar incidents, therecall was expanded.

As of Oct. 13, there had been 96 reports of Note 7 batteriesoverheating in the U.S., including 13 in which people were burnedand 47 causing property damage, according to CPSC.

The consumer agency praised the efforts of Samsung and wirelesscarriers to push customers to return the phones. While most U.S.recalls have a “low” consumer response rate, 97 percent of Note 7phones have been returned, the agency said.

Samsung investigation

Similar to what the company told the U.S. agency last fall, Samsungon Monday released the results of its internal investigation intothe failures, concluding that flaws in battery manufacturing anddesign had led to short circuits causing the overheating incidentsand fires.

The company said on Monday it’s focused on learning from itsmistakes as it prepares to launch the next in its Galaxy S line. Aspokesman on Tuesday had no immediate comment on the CPSCstatement.

Lithium-ion batteries have been a boon to manufacturers ofelectronic devices because they hold power more efficiently andlast longer than other power packs. At the same time, they haveperiodically raised safety concerns because the chemicals insideare flammable and they hold so much energy that a failure can causea rapid increase in heat or even an explosion.

Related: Samsung sees $5.3 billion profit impact from Note 7crisis

Kaye, who was appointed by President Barack Obama and isexpected to be replaced as chairman by President Donald Trump, tookthe opportunity to urge Congress to give the agency morefunding.

“We have great people and will do the absolute best job we canwith our investigation, but unless Congress finally treats consumersafety as the priority it should be, we will not be able to matchwhat Samsung has done by building a new facility for this purposeand using hundreds of engineers to test hundreds of thousands ofphones and batteries,” he said.