Toxic Toys to Avoid This Holiday Season

A pencil case similar to this one was found to contain toxic metals. Photo by Viacom International Inc.

There is nothing more alarming than learning that a toy or baby product you have in your home has been recalled for causing choking, falls, or strangulation. But now a new report is adding yet another worry to the list: toxic metals like lead, cadmium, antimony, and cobalt have just been detected in 20 popular holiday toys in New York. Plus, plenty of others, including phthalates, have detected in toys around the country.

“If you talk to any parent and ask, ‘Do you want harmful chemicals in your kid’s toys?’ their answer would be no. And the toys can be made without them,” Bobbi Wilding, deputy director of Clean and Healthy New York, tells Yahoo Parenting. On Thursday, the organization joined forces with New York State Senator Jeff Klein to release the findings of a new report, “Toxic Tidings: Chemicals of Concern in Children’s Products.” It was an effort to encourage the New York State Senate to pass the languishing Child Safe Products Act (already approved by the Assembly), which requires manufacturers report their use of toxic chemicals in kids’ products, and then gives them a year to banish them altogether before banning sale of the product.

The 12-page report detailed kids’ toys that were analyzed and found to contain toxic metals, and included a Spiderman foil puzzle containing cobalt; Hello Kitty jewelry containing cadmium, cobalt, and antimony; a Dora the Explorer pencil case containing cadmium and lead, and a set of Gerber onesies with cadmium and cobalt. “Exposure to toxic chemicals like antimony, arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, lead and mercury, at any level, endangers children,” a press release notes. “Scientific studies show that consistent exposure could lead to autism, behavioral problems, cancer, early onset puberty, learning disorders, lower IQs, neurological damage, osteoporosis, respiratory conditions and type 2 diabetes.”

Photo by Kohl’s Illinois, Inc.

Other similar efforts have been waged across the country this month. U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), an independent research organization, released its 29th annual “Trouble in Toyland” report, which called out, among other dangers, toys containing dangerous levels of toxic materials such as lead, chromium, and phthalates. Among the troubling finds: a Jake and the Neverland Pirates tambourine, a Hello Kitty bracelet and barrette kit, a set of fake sheriff badges, and a rubber duck. World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH) recently released its own list of the 10 most dangerous toys, which posed accident-related risks; but it also issued a warning about chemical hazards.

On a federal level, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), took a positive step on Wednesday by voting to approve proposed rules that would further limit phthalates (a harmful family of chemicals used in plastics) from being used in children’s products. “Many parents desperately want to know — and all parents certainly deserve to know — that their children’s toys and child care articles are not exposing them to harmful chemicals, whether in isolation or cumulatively,” noted CPSC chairman Elliot Kaye at a public meeting on the vote on Wednesday.

CPSC spokesperson Scott Wolfson tells Yahoo Parenting that the commission always respects state and local legislators who aim to add their own laws regarding consumer product safety. He notes, though, that with the passage of the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the U.S. now has “some of the strongest limits in the world addressing toxic metals,” including a limit of 90 parts of lead per million in any surface area of a toy, and a limit of 100 parts lead per million in any inside content of a toy. The strong rules, he notes, have lead to a “precipitous drop in toy recalls” based on those chemicals, with zero such recalls in 2013 and just one in 2014. And so before getting worried, Wolfson says, “Parents need to know what rules are in place already.”

But Wilding, while acknowledging the recent efforts on the part of the CPSC, says the amount of toxic chemicals in toys is not the issue. “It’s a lot easier to ban them instead of having manufacturers ask, ‘How much can we get away with?’” she says. “Frankly, they don’t belong there at all.”

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