Nov 19, 2006 | Jane Kaye | San Francisco Chronicle
| Phthalates The San Francisco law prohibits
the manufacture, sale or distribution of toys and child
care products if they contain the phthalates DEHP, DBP or
BBP in levels higher than 0.1 percent. Products for
children younger than 3 are banned if they contain DINP,
DIDP or DnOP in levels exceeding 0.1 percent. Production: Made by Dow Chemical, Bayer, General Electric Plastics, Sunoco Chemicals and Hexion Specialty Chemicals. |
Widely used chemicals with suspected links to cancer
and developmental problems in humans are present in common baby
products like the yellow rubber ducky, bath books and clear
plastic bottles, a Chronicle analysis confirmed.
The toxic chemicals, which are used to harden or soften plastics,
can leach out each time a baby sucks on a favorite doll or gnaws
on a cool teething ring, scientists say.
Starting Dec. 1, a
first-in-the-nation ban goes into effect in San Francisco, prohibiting the sale, distribution and
manufacture of baby products containing any level of bisphenol A
and certain levels of phthalates.
The law, modeled on a European Union ban that started this year,
reflects emerging concerns by environmental health scientists
over the buildup of industrial chemicals in humans, particularly
young children. Especially under scrutiny are chemicals that
mimic estrogen, possibly disrupting the hormonal system and
altering the normal workings of genes.
Yet the trouble is that no one knows for sure how many baby
products contain the chemicals. Stores, many of which are still
unaware of the pending ban, will be unable to decide what to take
off the shelves because manufacturers aren't required to disclose
what chemicals go into a product. For that reason, The Chronicle
set out to test several common baby toys and found that most of them even ones labeled
"safe, non-toxic" contained the chemicals.
Toymakers and companies affected by the ban have sued
to block enforcement of the San Francisco law, saying their products have been used safely for
decades. A January hearing is scheduled. If
the courts uphold the measure, most companies say they'll comply
with the ban even though they believe it's unnecessary.
"The U.S. government has always felt that what's in the
marketplace is perfectly safe for the consumer," said Jeff
Holzman, CEO of New York-based Goldberger Doll Manufacturing Co.,
who found out from The Chronicle that his company's Fuzzy Fleece
Doll would be banned under the San Francisco law.
"Be that as it may, if there's a question, all the products
that we make will be made without phthalates by 2007," he
said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admits that its own
guidelines called reference doses for safe human exposure to the
chemicals are decades old and don't take into account the new
research. The EPA is actively reassessing the health risks of
three types of phthalates but is not reassessing bisphenol A,
agency spokeswoman Suzanne Ackerman said.
The Food and Drug Administration, which controls chemicals that
may touch food, and Consumer
Product Safety Commission, which is responsible for toy safety,
haven't limited the chemicals in baby products for years.
Representatives say they have no plans to impose new
restrictions.
Chemical-makers say that's appropriate.
"We believe at very low levels of exposure, there is no
concern," said Marian Stanley, a spokeswoman for the four U.S. phthalate-makers.
Low doses of
bisphenol A are
also not a health risk, said Steve Hentges, a spokesman for the
five major U.S. companies that make that chemical. "In every
case, the weight of evidence supports the conclusion that
bisphenol A is not a risk to human health at the extremely low
levels to which people might be exposed," he said.
Many scientists who study the materials disagree and point to
hundreds of scientific studies they say show why bans such as San
Francisco's are needed.
It's not the first time San Francisco has led the way in
instituting a chemical ban. A decade ago, its leaders voted to
eliminate the most toxic pesticides from city property. That sort
of action is needed to cut exposure to harmful chemicals, said
Dr. Richard Jackson, a UC Berkeley professor who for a decade
headed the Center for Environmental Health at the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
"We don't want dry-cleaning solvents in our livers, lead in
our brains or perchlorate in our thyroids. We certainly don't
want endocrine disrupters in breast milk and umbilical cord
blood. We need to be ratcheting down these levels in people by
reducing the loading of these chemicals in the environment,''
Jackson said.
The Intergovernmental Forum on Chemical Safety, a group based at
the World Health Organization, recommended in September
prevention of exposure to known hazards from chemicals already
detected in some toys.
"Protections for children from chemicals in toys are weak at
best and dysfunctional at worst,'' said Joel Tickner, a professor
of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts
Lowell. He has served as a consultant to the forum and on
national panels that advise the U.S. government on chemicals in
the environment.
"Consumers would be astonished if they knew that federal
laws regulating chemicals in children's toys all require
balancing the benefits of protecting children with the costs to
industry of implementing safer alternatives," he said.
The tests
It's often impossible for parents to tell if the teething ring or
baby rattle they hand their children contains bisphenol A or
phthalates. The Chronicle purchased 16 children's products and
sent them to the STAT Analysis Corp. laboratory in Chicago, one
of the few commercial labs that test for these chemicals.
The city's ordinance bans
the manufacture, distribution or sale of items intended for
children younger than 3 if they contain any level of bisphenol A.
Six different forms of phthalates are covered by the ban, which
sets the maximum phthalate
level at 0.1 percent of the chemical
makeup of any part of the product. Three
of those phthalates are banned only in items intended for kids
younger than 3, but the law doesn't include age limits for
products that contain three other phthalates DEHP, DBP and BBP.
Some items exceeded the city's phthalate limits:
These products were found to contain bisphenol A and would be banned in the city:
The method used by STAT to test for bisphenol A wasn't
sensitive enough to detect the chemical in three polycarbonate
clear plastic baby bottles made by Philips Avent, Gerber and
Playtex and one clear plastic Gerber cup. Experts from the
American Plastics Council, however, say that polycarbonate
plastic can't be made without bisphenol A. Those items would be
banned under the San Francisco law.
The lab didn't detect the chemicals in three other products
chosen by The Chronicle:
Most companies whose items were found to contain
phthalates or bisphenol A learned about the pending San Francisco
ban through interviews with The Chronicle.
Among them was Walgreen Co., which has since begun to examine
ways to comply with the ban. Officials at the company's Illinois
headquarters said the chain is asking its vendors to identify
products that do not comply with the San Francisco law.
Representatives for Prestige Brands in Irvington, N.Y., said the
company would remove the teether with phthalates from San
Francisco shelves and is working on finding an alternative.
After Random House officials learned of the test results on their
baby bath books, they made plans to conduct their own tests. The
company pledged to stop shipping books to San Francisco if it
finds the products would violate the pending ban.
When notified of the chemicals in its products, Hasbro spokesman
Gary Serby responded in an e-mail: "Hasbro does not agree
with the science behind the ordinance, but will comply as of Dec.
1."
Nidia Tatalovich, a Disney representative, said all of the
company's products meet state and federal compliance guidelines.
She said that her company would examine the San Francisco law.
Shannon Jenest, spokeswoman for Philips Avent, which makes
polycarbonate baby bottles, said, "We're working through the
details right now. We're very concerned with those standards and
will make sure that we adhere to those guidelines."
Munchkin, the company whose teething ring contained bisphenol A,
didn't respond to repeated queries.
In the past three weeks, groups representing the chemical
manufacturers, toymakers, retailers and San Francisco's toy
stores, Citikids and Ambassador Toys, filed two separate
lawsuits, arguing that the city doesn't have the authority to
pass such a ban.
Some of the same trade groups the California Retailers
Association, the California Grocers Association, the Juvenile
Products Manufacturers Association and the American Chemistry
Council successfully fought a bill this year in the state
Legislature that would have enacted a ban similar to San
Francisco's. The city agreed to delay enforcement of its
ordinance until a Jan. 8 hearing at which the companies will seek
a preliminary injunction. A hearing date hasn't been set for the
second lawsuit, which was filed Thursday.
Yet even without an injunction, there are no penalties for
companies that violate the ban. City leaders said they wanted to
make sure all companies knew about the ban before issuing fines
or taking other actions.
The San Francisco ordinance is certain to cause concern among
parents who may not have been aware of the European ban or
studies on chemicals commonly found in child products.
Mary Brune, a technical writer from Alameda, said she first
started paying attention to the issue when she was nursing her
baby last year and read about chemicals in breast milk. With two
friends, she founded Making Our Milk Safe, or MOMS.
She scans Web sites to find toys made without plastics and tells
friends about baby bottles made from glass, polyethylene,
propylene and other materials considered safe. She stores food in
glass. Last month she passed out leaflets near Albany's Target
store, urging company officials to remove polyvinyl chloride
(PVC) toys from their shelves.
"It's impossible to keep plastic toys out of children's
mouth. They chew on things," Brune said. "So we as
parents rely on the manufacturers of products to ensure their
safety. If consumers demand safer products and businesses demand
safer products from their suppliers, we'll be able to get these
toxic products off our shelves."
The health effects
Scientists simply don't know how low or high levels of phthalates
or bisphenol A will cause health problems in babies if they suck
on a bottle or handle a doll containing those substances.
Studies on the chemicals are largely conducted with high-dose and
low-dose experiments on animals, which over time help scientists
determine the level of chemicals that may pose unacceptable
risks.
Those sorts of strictly controlled animal experiments are what
first showed that the pesticide chlordane could cause cancer and
that industrial pollutants like dioxin could cause birth defects.
Such studies were also cited when California named one phthalate
a carcinogen in 1988 and two others as reproductive toxicants in
2005.
There is a dearth of long-term, epidemiological studies on
children exposed to phthalates and bisphenol A. So scientists
from groups like the American Chemistry Council say the fact that
the chemicals are found in human bodies doesn't necessarily mean
they cause health problems.
Yet scientists who study phthalates and bisphenol A say there is
enough evidence to implicate some forms of the chemicals now.
New evidence about how bisphenol A affects lab animals and how it
can leach out of items such as plastic bottles came out of 1999
research by Koji Arizono at Japan's Kumamoto University.
Arizono found that a used polycarbonate baby bottle can leach out
bisphenol A at daily levels that damaged the brain and
reproductive systems in lab animals. If a 9-pound baby drinks
about a quart of liquid from the bottle a day, it can ingest 4
micrograms of bisphenol A.
"We're showing that amount is in the zone of danger, based
on the animal studies,'' said University of Missouri researcher
Frederick vom Saal, who said that the doses that have hurt lab
animals were very close to what a baby would get from a baby
bottle.
Vom Saal found that 148 published bisphenol A studies, all
financed by government bodies, reported significant health
effects, including altering the function of organs and
reproductive systems in male and female animals.
That compares with 27 studies that found no evidence of harm.
Thirteen of those studies were financed by chemical corporations.
Last year, researchers at the Tufts University School of Medicine
exposed pregnant lab rodents to levels of bisphenol A 2,000 times
lower than the EPA's 18-year-old safety guideline, which the
agency admits is outdated. That old guideline suggests it would
be safe, for example, for a 9-pound baby to swallow about 200
milligrams (or 200,000 micrograms) of the chemical a day.
But rodents given just a very small fraction of that amount
showed changes in mammary glands. In humans, such changes are
associated with a higher risk of breast cancer. Other researchers
showed that exposure of newborn rats to bisphenol A causes early
stages of prostate cancer.
Testifying before the state Legislature this year on the failed
bill, one of the EPA's top phthalate researchers, Earl Gray, said
studies on pregnant rodents found in their male offspring such
effects as disrupted testosterone production and low sperm
counts, malformation of sexual organs, and disruption of the
endocrine system.
There's no reason to believe that the same effects wouldn't be
the same in humans as well, Gray said.
And last year, for the first time, scientists showed that
pregnant women who had higher concentrations of some phthalates
in their urine were more likely to later give birth to sons with
genitals that showed changes similar to those seen in exposed
rodents.
It appeared that human infants, like rodents, were less
completely masculinized. Some of the changes, including
incompletely descended testes, were similar to those included in
the "phthalate syndrome" seen in lab rodents that
received high doses of phthalates, University of Rochester
researchers found. Later in the lab animals' lives, those genital
changes were associated with lower sperm count, decreased
fertility and, in some, testicular tumors.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which works closely with
industry, has developed a voluntary agreement to eliminate the
phthalate DEHP in some baby products.
In 1983, the commission determined that substantial exposure to
DEHP could put children at risk of cancer. The agency didn't
issue a regulation, but instead reached an agreement with the Toy
Industry Association to keep DEHP out of pacifiers, rattles and
teethers. The agreement leaves unregulated all other toys that
babies put in their mouths.
When advised that Chronicle tests found that all the polyvinyl
chloride toys contained DEHP, including a teether, Scott Wolfson,
a spokesman for the commission, promised that his agency would
look into it.
Nevertheless, Wolfson said his agency believes that consumer
products that contain low levels of phthalates are not a danger
to children. His agency doesn't conduct its own tests on toys but
follows up when other organizations share test results, he said.
"We have a saying: 'The dose makes the poison.' We are not
seeing a high dose of phthalates coming out of a product and into
the body of a child."
METHODOLOGY
The Chronicle decided to find out what popular toys and child
care items sold in San Francisco contained chemicals that would
be banned under a new city ordinance effective Dec. 1.
Chronicle environment writer Jane Kay purchased a random
selection of 16 plastic baby items, including a toy doll and a
horse, a rubber ducky, books, teethers and baby bottles.
The Chronicle sent the box of products to STAT Analysis Corp.'s
laboratory in Chicago, one of the few labs that can test for
bisphenol A and six forms of phthalates.
The Chronicle identified parts of the toys and baby items that
should be tested by the lab. Lab workers cut the items apart and
weighed the pieces before adding them into a solvent of methylene
chloride. After several hours, lab workers used the solution to
quantify the amount of bisphenol A and phthalates in the
products.
The method used to detect bisphenol A wouldn't be expected to
find the chemical at low levels. Yet the lab, using gas
chromatography and mass spectrometry, found both bisphenol A and
phthalates in many of the products.
Uses: Softens polyvinyl chloride products such as toys,
raincoats, shower curtains and medical tubing. Found in
upholstery, detergents, oils and cosmetics.
Health effects: Lab animal studies show some phthalates interfere
with hormonal systems, disrupt testosterone production and cause
malformed sex organs. The DEHP form is a carcinogen and a
reproductive toxicant. Phthalates shed or leach from products.
Regulation: The San
Francisco law prohibits the manufacture, sale or distribution of
toys and child care products if they contain the phthalates DEHP,
DBP or BBP in levels higher than 0.1 percent. Products for
children younger than 3 are banned if they contain DINP, DIDP or
DnOP in levels exceeding 0.1 percent.
Production: Made by BASF Corp., Eastman Chemical Co., ExxonMobil
Chemical Co. and Ferro Corp.
Bisphenol A
Uses: Acts as building block in hard, clear polycarbonate plastic
baby bottles, water bottles and containers. Found in liners
inside food and drink cans, electronic equipment and spray-on
flame retardants.
Health effects: Lab animal studies show that at low levels,
bisphenol A can alter the function of the thyroid gland, brain,
pancreas and prostate gland. It leaches out of products under
normal use. It is found in humans, especially in placental and
fetal tissue.
Regulation: San Francisco law prohibits manufacture, sale or distribution of a toy or child
care article intended for use by a child younger than 3 if it
contains bisphenol A.
Production: Made by Dow Chemical, Bayer, General Electric
Plastics, Sunoco Chemicals and Hexion Specialty Chemicals.