Deep Green Discounts

Just a quick note on this snowy Minnesota Tuesday to let you know that Babycenter, the huge cog in the baby/maternity industrial complex, is closing down its giant store in early January. I'm not typically a Babycenter fan--it is owned in part by Johnson & Johnson--but their store did begin to stock some organic and nontoxic items this year. Because the store is closing, many of these items are on deep, deep discount: 80% in some cases. I just loaded up on a bunch of things, both for myself when the time comes for our second baby, and for friends who are expecting babies this coming year. A number of Under the Nile organic cotton clothes and blankets are on sale, organic nursing covers, BornFree accessories, organic washclothes and bath accessories, nontoxic toys, etc, etc. Just make sure you type "organic" into the keyword search field. It brings you directly to the part of their store where their "green" products are divided by type.

Check it out if you're in the market for nontoxic, organic products but have been strapped thanks to the crappy economy. This is a pretty good chance to load up on otherwise pricier items. Not to mention that if you spend more than $49, you get free shipping (Code: FREESHIP49)

BabyCenter's Closeout Sale.

Quiet waning days of December

As you can see, I've not been on my computer for the last couple of weeks, thanks to loads of fun holiday chores and festivities. I did want to drop in before 2009 rolls in to direct your attention to the Union of Concerned Scientistswebpage. They are currently asking scientists (including anyone working toward advanced degree in the sciences and health fields) and engineers to join their Scientist Call-to-Action for restoring scientific integrity. RSI is actually a network for scientists and others in the science, mathematics, health sciences, and engineering fields to come together to fight off scientific interference and the like. God knows we need more scientists to stop taking corporate dollars and more scientists holding the FDA and EPA accountable for their tainted science.

If you aren't in any of those fields, you can still join the Union of Concerned Scientists as a member.

But isn't this what we wanted?

In the past few weeks, I have received several requests e-mails from other mothers urging me to sign a petition that would exempt “small toymakers” and “trusted toy companies” from the mandatory third party toy safety testing legislated by Congress to ensure the toy supply is free from elevated levels of lead, phthalates, and the like (the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act). The idea is to let certain toymakers off the hook for safety testing, which the “Handmade Toy Alliance” claims can run from $150 to $4,000 a toy. Some of the petitions seem to suggest that the toxic toys in our toy supply come exclusively from China, that American toymakers can be trusted, that European toymakers are so vigilant that toxic toys do not enter their toy supply, and that toymakers who manufacture batches of five thousand toys or fewer produce “safe” toys. These petitions warn of bankruptcy, of toymakers pulling out of the U.S. market, and other unlikely doomsday scenarios.

These petitions are deeply upsetting to me, both as a consumer and as a mother. These petitions are seriously misleading; many of them are authored by toy manufacturer front groups, and are written in such a way that have convinced thousands of parents that the only way to ensure a safe toy supply is to let small toymakers and “trusted” companies bypass toxicity testing.

Just last week, The Ecology Center released its toxicity results for more than fifteen hundred toys. One in three was found to contain elevated levels of either lead, bromine, PVC, mercury, or arsenic. Perhaps more worrying, the Center found that the country of origin mattered little when it came to what toys contained high levels of toxins. For example, the Ecology Center found 21% of toys from China had detectable levels of lead in 2008; 16% of toys from all other countries contained detectable levels of lead. And of the seventeen toys made in the USA that the Ecology Center tested, a whopping 35% had detectable levels of lead. In fact, one of the toys containing the highest levels of lead—an unbelievable 190,943 ppm—was the Halloween Pumpkin Pin made here in the States.

With information like this at hand, the text of one petition becomes even more distressing: “I support a reform of the CPSIA so that toys made in batches of less than 5,000 units per year or manufactured within the USA and trusted countries with established toy safety regimes such as Canada and the European Union be held exempt from third party testing requirements.” If the petitioners have their way, the manufacturers of the Halloween Pumpkin Pin, and other U.S. and European toys would not be required to undergo independent toxicity testing.

Another particularly alarming example can be found on the Mothering.com website. An editorial urges parents to write to their congress people and demand exemptions. Haba was singled out as a toymaker that would unfairly affected by mandatory toy testing. But the Ecology Center found several Haba toys contained elevated levels of toxins, including one toy with frighteningly high levels of lead. Yet Haba falls into the petitioners’ category of “trusted company.”

Petitions like these are dangerous because they serve to muddy the waters at the already turbid waters of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (to whom these petitions will be sent). Worse, they make consumers—including those of us who worked so hard to get the CPSC to get its act together—look fickle, ill-informed, and less credible than we wish to seem. It's as if we parents are talking out of both sides of our mouths: we want mandatory testing, but we want some toymakers to be exempt.
Safety testing is a cost of doing business in this country. Our regulatory agencies have been embarrassingly inefficient when it comes to protecting consumers, most especially children. Now that the government has stepped up and offered us a basic protection we should have had years ago, thousands of parents are asking for that protection to be rolled back. I find it astounding. . It would be easy if the only people complaining about these new regulations were toy manufacturers and other industry types with a dog in this fight. But with thousands of concerned, well-meaning parents signing their names to these ambiguous petitions, the problem becomes infinitely more complex.

Mandatory third-party testing of toys should be just that: mandatory. All toy companies who ask us to purchase their toys for our children should take part in this very basic part of doing business. No matter if their batches are 500 or 5 million. And if toy companies can’t or won’t adhere to this law, then I will not be sorry to them go.

Isn't this what we've been fighting for all along?

If you get one of these petitions, please read it carefully before deciding to sign it. If you don't want to sign it but don't want to have to explain yourself, send them a link to this post.

Link to one of the petitions currently circulating. Please note the petition is sponsored by the "Handmade Toymakers Alliance."

The Idiocy and Inefficiency of the CPSC: Lou Dobbs' cathartic rant

The CPSC promised last year that 2008 would be the safest year for toys, following on the heels of a disastrous 2007 when more than 25 million toys were recalled. Toys were recalled for high lead levels, for having tiny pieces that easily broke off, and, wait for it, for having components that metastized into a date rape drug.

Nancy Nord, head of the CPSC and candidate for the most incompetent federal employee of the last decade, downplayed the events of 2007, saying the media reports about high lead levels had only "confused" parents, that they had been overblown, that the toy supply is safer than it has ever been (a misleading claim made by the USDA and FDA as well--each passing year should, as a matter of course, be safer than the year before if only because of better technology and more knowledge, but I digress.)

Lou Dobbs recently ranted on CNN about the Healthy Toys Coalition's findings that have 35% of toys containing elevated levels of toxins, including lead levels high enough for recalls. In watching that video, I came across his February rant about Nancy Nord and the CPSC and found it deeply satisfying. Hope you do, too.

And please don't forget to visit the Healthy Toys Coalition website. Perhaps some year, a toy boycott will be a real possibility.

Babes in (Healthy) Toyland

So it's that time of year again, time to scour the shelves for safe but fun toys for our little ones. It seems to get harder every year, because every year we learn of more hard-to-pronounce chemicals we need to avoid. This was a big year for parents and others concerned with providing children truly safe toys: phthalates and lead were legislated out of toys by Congress (although those laws don't go into effect until next year--and you'll be seeing a lot of fire sales of toys containing phthalates, for example, during the holiday season.)

Today, Healthy Toys released its incredibly useful test results for more than 1,500 toys, including its "Best" and "Worst" toys of the year. The tests measure for lead, mercury, cadmium, bromine, arsenic, and chlorine. One rather alarming finding was that Little Tikes Bath Letters and Numbers were found to contain high levels of mercury. Anyway, take a look at the site, check your holiday purchases or those on your children's wish lists against the test results, and take it from there.

In the same vein, I had a rather odd experience the other day with an outfit called Constructive Playthings. I discovered the company through yet another unsolicited catalog. I typically throw these things in the recycle bin without looking through them, but the catalog had some interesting looking wooden toys, so I thought I'd take a look. While the catalog had one page devoted to "green" toys, which is admirable for a company that has been in business so long using everyday components, I found a number of toys made of PVC/vinyl, and not even a small amount, but as a major component. I decided to drop them an e-mail about it, just to voice my concerns and to let them know that once they phase PVC out of their children's products, I would consider purchasing from them. I got a response back from an e-mail account from what looks to be an executive assistant but which contained an e-mail from the company president. Among other things, he said: "We have no PVC or phthalates in products for children under 3 where an infant or toddler can “mouth” it and have been PVC/phthalate compliant for 5 or 6 years for these types of products."

Well, I was in the middle of preparing my son's lunch, but just a cursory glance through this catalog showed that there were several toys on offer for children under 3 that contained quite a bit of vinyl. I wrote the following:

One example: In that catalog, on page 13, your "Soft Play Forms" are covered in "durable, vinyl covered foam." It is designated in your catalog as being for children age 1 and up. Another product containing vinyl designated for children under 3 is your Peek-a-Boo Climber on page 33. I mention these products because you said you have "no products" containing vinyl for children 3 and under. Just a quick glance in your catalog reveals two. The concern about vinyl/PVC is not just the toxicity present in repeated oral exposure. The VOCs released by new vinyl is potent and, to many people, sickening.

I never heard back. Constructive Playthings isn't an evil company. Not by a long shot. In fact, it is trying to offer nontoxic alternatives because a.) the market is dictating such products now that word is out on the street about things like PVC, lead, formaldehyde, and so on, and b.)legislation is now mandating it. However, until they hear from more parents about this issue, they will continue to sell products like the "vinyl-covered foam blocks" for one-year-olds. These kind of products have absolutely no place in our children's nurseries. But because our own regulating agencies are unable or unwilling to protect us as consumers, the onus is on us, at least for now, to speak up for ourselves. Companies in a capitalistic society like ours will listen and will change, but only if enough of us take the time to let them know what we want as well as what we are unwilling to tolerate. Like PVC/vinyl in children's toys.

Like an author suing the New York Times for a bad book review: More from the Annals of Interference in Science

Last week, a company called Biopure, which makes blood subsitutes, branched off the tree of intereference in science, and got all tortious on a researcher who dared write a critical review of the product in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They sued him for slander.

This is akin to an author suing Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times for slander after she decimates their book in a review (many, no doubt, would love to.) What Biopure has done is open a door--one I am frankly surprised could even be pried open--to silencing critical research by threatening lawsuits. No one wants to be sued. It's expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally exhausting, and if the lawsuit is a frivolous one, as it is in this case, then it's just downright immoral.

Biopure didn't like researcher Charles Natanson's review of the firm's "Hemopure," which, Natanson's research showed, had a 30 percent increase in mortality risk. Natanson came to this conclusion in research done with colleagues, which was essentially a pooled analysis of five different blood substitutes. All five products were analyzed; all five products were commented upon. Biopure is the only one suing.

"[The suit] could have an enormous chilling effect on scientific inquiry," Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steve Nissen said of this case. (Nissen was the guy whose research on Vioxx and Avandia revealed the dangers in those drugs.)

Biopure is saying that because Natanson didn't disclose the fact that is named on a patent application for a technology that reduces harmful side effects on blood subtitute products. I am unclear how this has any bearing on his "intent" to slander Biopure. One would think, selfishly, that he'd actually want these blood products to be harmful, so he can have a bigger market for his patented technology! It seems, instead, he was going against his own self-interest when he sent copies of the paper to regulators (thank you, Charles Natanson, for doing so--they won't read non-industy research on their own, it seems).

It is a desperate, but potentially dangerous, move to sue a researcher for "slander" because your product got a bad review. Let's hope this case is swiftly dismissed.