Parents strive to protect kids from everyday chemical hazards There may be no more powerful force for social change in the world than worried parents. And they're turning their attention to lead in lunchboxes, bisphenol A in plastic, and other eco-nasties in their children's daily lives, switching to greener-seeming products -- like cloth totes and wax-paper wrappers for school lunches -- and sharing information. Breeders' buying power can transform the market: green goods retailer Seventh Generation has seen double-digit growth in sales for the past five years, which the company attributes in part to new parents. Making healthy choices for kids may not get easier any time soon, though, as the Bush administration has proposed killing the National Children's Study, a research effort authorized by Congress in 2000 to understand how environmental factors affect asthma, childhood cancer, and other growing health problems. The study -- set to start in 2007 -- will involve tracking 100,000 children from the womb to age 21. Or would have, anyway.

straight to the source: The New York Times, Julie Bick, 12 Mar 2006

Invisible Danger? Parents Look Inside the Lunchbox
By JULIE BICK
New York Times, March 12, 2006
NY Times reference

REACHING into their nylon lunch bags at school, Casey and Cameron Lilley pull sandwiches made of organic ingredients out of wax paper wrappers, and sip water from coated aluminum containers from Switzerland. Their mother, Shawn Lilley, had carefully chosen the packaging.

At a recent gathering of kindergarten mothers in Seattle, Ms. Lilley told the women that chemicals could leach from plastic bags and other plastic containers into food. Since then, a few more kindergartners have shown up with sandwiches in wax paper.

"Shawn researches these kinds of things, and it's not that much more expensive, so we switched," said Linda Walker, who packs lunch daily for her three children.

Whether the information on chemical hazards comes from magazines, the Web or the playground, many parents are changing their buying habits to try to protect children from what they see as dangers. Information on what exactly is toxic, however, is scant and sometimes conflicting.

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved 80,000 chemicals for consumer use, said Dr. Leonardo Trasande, assistant director at the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Of those, 2,800 are produced in volumes of more than a million pounds a year, but fewer than half the high-volume ones have been studied for toxicity, he said.

Until more information is available about those chemicals, Dr. Trasande recommended that parents focus on common and significant risks, like lead, pesticides and tobacco smoke, in their children's environment.