Toxic toys?

I went to a news conference yesterday about toxins in toys.

We gathered in a South Minneapolis home, where a concerned mom and her three kids hosted us in their play room.

Lindsay Dahl, of Healthy Toys, used an XRF, a portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer (which looks sort of like the thing that they zap our products with in the check out line), to identify the elemental composition of several toys.

Dahl tested a baseball mitt, a plastic lunch box, a rubber ducky, and a long plastic snake. Several of these items came up with higher then recommended levels of lead in them.

But I also learned about phthalates, which are a group of industrial chemicals that add flexibility and resilience to most vinyls and many plastics, like PVC. Phthalates occur in many plastics that children play with.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that there is a negligible risk to kids when they play with vinyl toys containing phthalates, but many activists are concerned.

Children under three years of age put almost everything they come into contact with in their mouths. And Lindsay Dahl says that as kids play and chew on their toys, they are coming into contact with chemicals such as cadmium, lead and PVC (the plastic which has phthalates in it to soften it).

Jeni Von Reuter, the mom who hosted us, said it worried her to learn that these chemicals were turning up in toys in her house.

“As a parent you work so hard to protect your kids from contaminants,” she said. “We have a one-year-old who is putting everything in his mouth. It’s really hard to know what’s safe and what’s not.”

Healthy Legacy tested 1200 toys. They found that 35% contained lead and 47% contained PVC. Overall, 72% of the toys tested contained at least one of the chemicals of concern.

The Toy Industry Association is arguing that parents don’t need to panic if these chemicals are in toys. In an Associated Press report today, Joan Lawrence, The Toy Industry Association’s vice president of standards and safety, says:

“The mere presence of any substance alone is only half the answer. You need to know if it’s accessible to the child. We can’t tell that from what I know of the tests that have been done by this group.”

You can find the list of toys tested at Healthy Toys. For safety standards, go to The Toy Industry Association’s TOY INFO.

The news conference got me thinking about the kids whose parents get worried and ask them to give up their toys.

What if kids have gotten attached to those toys? What do parents say?

How do we talk to kids about the potential dangers in their toys?

And… if we take those toys away from them, and donate the toys to a second hand store, we’re passing the problem on to other households, right?