Playing With Fire

I like water. Plain old water—no lemon, no high fructose corn syrup disguised as some fair approximation of fruit flavor, and certainly no fizzy, bubbly stuff. I spend a lot of time drinking water. I certainly spend way more money than I'd like buying it. So, about a year ago, I said to myself that it was time I cut back on the mountain of Poland Spring bottles I'm personally responsible for depositing into the nation's landfills and instead invest in something reusable. Since then, a Nalgene sports bottle has pretty much been my constant companion. I'd picked a Nalgene bottle specifically because the outdoorsy types among my friends had recommended it for its uncanny ability to prevent the flavor of whatever you're drinking from seeping into the plastic and forever after adding the residual memory of said drink into whatever you're sipping next. It's the closest thing you can get to glass, they said, but without having to worry about glass' weight or its fragility. It's why Nalgene is a favorite of hikers. It also didn't hurt that its 24 oz. size allowed me cut to back considerably on my trips to the office kitchenette, and by extension, helped in my never-ending battle to ignore the candy machine's daily “Sirens' Song of the Peanut M&Ms.” But last month, to my immense surprise, I stumbled across a Reuters story out of Canada that, sadly, has me contemplating ending my relationship with Nalgene.

Canada's largest outdoor-goods retailer announced that it was pulling from its shelves all bottles made of polycarbonate plastic of the type used to make Nalgene because a chemical used to produce it, bisphenol A (BPA), can leach from bottles and the other types of food containers it's commonly found in and cause all sorts of health problems if ingested in enough quantity. The retailer's move, mimicked in the U.S. by outdoor equipment retailer Patagonia, was a precaution; the reality of whether BPA is truly a problem is still up for debate. Studies have been trotted out both pro and con about the degree of risk the chemical actually poses. Suffice it to say, I'm leaning heavily towards tossing my Nalgene bottle into the trash, where it will end up in a landfill … forever, most likely, as I doubt it will ever break down; its impermeable plastic is just that wondrous. Personally, I'm not going to take risks with my health over Nalgene, regardless of its convenience, and despite the fact that Nalgene's maker, Nuc Brand Products, the U.S. government and a trade association all tell me their studies say I have nothing to worry about.

I'll admit it, I'm a worrier.

I'm sure this story sounds familiar to you. Replace the term BPA with PVC, DINP or phthalates, and we're talking about the toy industry's longest running controversy. That controversy reignited last month the very same week I read about Nalgene's potential hazards. Sears Holding Corp., owner of both Sears and Kmart, announced it would stop using polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in its private label merchandise and packaging, and would phase out purchasing products that contain or are packaged in PVC-laden materials from its outside vendors in favor of “more sustainable choices given the potential health and environmental risks tied to the manufacture, use and disposal of PVC.” Just a few weeks prior, Target said it was making a similar move. Wal-Mart has been taking steady steps towards being PVC-free since 2005.

All of it is bad news for those toymakers, of which there are many, who choose to continue to play Russian roulette with their own reputations by doing something a growing body of evidence says they probably shouldn't do, but studies haven't yet been able to prove with 100 percent certainty. One thing is for sure: the push to get phthalates out of toys is no longer coming just from environmentalists, who are easy to argue with, but from those companies' biggest customers—who aren't. The good news for those manufacturers is that the decision about using phthalates has been made for them, by their own retail partners. And thanks to those retailers' leadership, the phthalates era should soon be over.

It's been almost 10 years since the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released the results of a landmark study of the chemical diisononyl phthalate (DINP), commonly used to soften plastic toys and other children's products, that “conclude[d] that few if any children are at risk from the chemical because the amount that they ingest does not reach a level that would be harmful.” Last year, the Toy Industry Association announced results of a review of more than 140 previous studies that led it to conclude “the current exposure of children to DINP-containing toys would pose a minimal to nonexistent risk of health effect.”

Please note the existence of qualifiers like 'few' and 'minimal' in both the CPSC and TIA statements.

Personally, I wouldn't want my child to be one of those 'few' who develops a health problem because a toy company couldn't figure out how to make a rubber ducky that didn't leach toxins into her bath water yet still keep it inexpensive enough to sell through price-obsessed retail accounts.

If anything, the lead-in-toys fiasco has shown that parents are willing to pay more for better quality toys, and that they'll look for alternatives when they no longer trust the safety of toys on the market. More often than not, it's the price of alternatives to phthalates that's the reason they're so commonly used—or at least that's what I've been told by toy manufacturers. If that's true, in the post-lead recall era there really are no defensible excuses as to why phthalates are necessary in children's products if there are alternatives out there and parents are willing to pay a premium for toys free of them. If removing phthalates from toys means reinventing the rubber ducky, so be it. The toy industry's full of clever people—I know you can do it. And if not, then kids will live without rubber duckies. In their place offer them something else, something just as fun but without words like 'cancer' and 'toxin' lurking around its edges.

If there's a scientific rationale for the continued use of phthalates, I don't know it. What I do know is that there's never been a better time than now to consign the phthalates issue to the dust bin of history. A concerted effort to remove one of the last remaining topics of potential disparagement could go a long way towards restoring consumers' trust in the toy business. All it takes is for you to make it happen.