toxic

Ask An Organic Mom

10 Alternatives to Toxic Toy Balls

October 6, 2008 at 11:11AM By Deirdre Dolan | comment

This week a reader asked about finding non toxic balls:

Hi,

I was hoping to find some help. My very young boy (14 months) is stealing balls from other kids in the playground. Time to get him one I guess. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that this might be an impossible task. He still likes to chew on everything. A ball for a child, you'd have thought someone would be making a big bouncy ball intended for young children that actually wasn't full of chemicals that could harm them.

So I thought I had found one at least five times only to discover that either the product was no longer available, or "green" by heresay only -- but nasty when tested, or even better ... good for the environment, but not for the baby. Sigh.

Please do you have any recommendations for me. Not interested in Crocodile Creek, or the Fair Trade Sports Ball.

I would have thought a big inflatable bouncy rubber ball, or even a leather one using leather cured in less toxic way would be best. Not sure if they exist.

Don't care what it looks like.

Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it. I have officially given up. ...

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tags: children, alternatives, parenting, Balls, toys, toxic, healthytoys.org

How to Choose Safe Shower Curtains

July 31, 2008 at 10:24AM By Deirdre Dolan | comment

It’s been a hot, moist summer here in NYC, and I ended up recycling my PEVA shower curtain and replacing it with a polyester one a few weeks ago because I couldn’t wash the mold out of the bottom of it. A soon-to-be-pregnant reader on the hunt for a safer shower curtain wrote to us wondering about a new shower curtain material she keeps seeing, PEVA:

In our quest to get pregnant this summer, my husband and I (ok, mostly me) have become more and more conscientious about the toxins, etc. around us - thanks largely to your book and blogs! While on the lookout for vinyl, I’ve recently noticed some products (shower curtains, lined baby bibs) labeled 100% PEVA. What is PEVA, and is it a safe alternative to PVC? I’m sure organic cotton is the best choice for many of these types of products, but when my options are vinyl, PEVA, or polyester, what’s a girl to do?

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tags: alternatives, toxic, pvc, PEVA, shower curtain

A Practical Guide for Protecting Your Child from Toxic Stuff

April 22, 2008 at 8:32AM By Alexandra Zissu | comment

There’s an excellent Los Angeles-based organization I’ve linked to many times on this blog – Healthy Child Healthy World. It was a great resource (back then it was called the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition) for us when reporting The Complete Organic Pregnancy and continues to be helpful today. It is one of the first places I send parents who are just tiptoeing into this world. It’s serious without being scary, and manages to be welcoming at the same time. ...

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tags: children, book review, toxic, babies, healthy child healthy world, exposure

The Toxic Baby Formula Question

April 17, 2008 at 11:41AM By Alexandra Zissu | comment

The Cornucopia Institute, a nonprofit government watchdog known for its dedication to, as they put it, “the fight for economic justice for the family-scale farming community,” put out a release earlier this week stating that brand name organic infant formulas contain ingredients processed with a toxic chemical. You can only imagine the mass hysteria in my email inbox. Many of the parents had already started to do their own research on the chemical, on the Institute, and more. I wanted to dig through the release to get to the bottom of it, but the other parents’ comments and questions confused me and sidetracked me. Eventually I sat down with the material, read it, and called up the Cornucopia Institute to ask some questions.

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tags: toxic, omega 3, organic baby food, cornucopia institute

3 Great Web Resources for Organic Moms

March 3, 2008 at 4:23PM By Alexandra Zissu | comment

Our readers are always asking for great one-stop online keep-toxins-away-from-our-growing-kids resources. Oh how we understand the impulse behind the question. The whole concept of The Complete Organic Pregnancy came about when Deirdre asked me how I planned to make the rest of my (then hypothetical) pregnancy as pure as the organic food I was eating. I didn't have an answer for her. So we both started researching – and found there was no single go-to source. So we turned our findings into the book.

Since then, many really great internet resources have been born. (You're reading one now!) Two of my go-to sources have recently spawned consumer-friendly sites that I feel are more than worth a mention here.

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