Car seat chemicals decline, but still persist

WASHINGTON _ Bromine levels in car seat materials have decreased over the last three years, but an advocacy group says they are still too high.

HealthyStuff.org and the Ecology Center, which are based in Berkeley, Calif., released a study recently evaluating 150 car seats on their safety based on levels of bromine, chlorine and lead. The rankings are meant to spur companies to action, as well as educate parents on how to buy the safest car seat.

Parents should look at the rankings when they are buying their next car seat and pick the one that works best with their lifestyle that has the lowest chemical ranking, said Jeff Gearhart, research director at HealthyStuff.org.

Dr. Keith English, pediatrician-in-chief at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospitals, emphasized that no amount of chemicals should cause parents not to use car seats.

“We encourage continued improvement in child car seat design and manufacture and welcome studies of potentially harmful chemicals contained in these products. However, while efforts to improve child car seats continue, it is critical to educate families about the lifesaving value of child car seats,” English said.

The results are a follow-up to a June 17 joint letter from the website and the Alliance for Toxic Free Fire Safety that asked car seat companies to phase out the use of hazardous flame retardants, disclose which chemicals are used in products and create companywide chemical policies. The companies have yet to respond.

“We’re really asking them to step up … in advance of any regulation,” Gearhart said. “We think that they’re already moving in that direction and the data supports that. We do see an overall improvement.”

Between 2008 and 2011, the annual report found, the average seat ranking improved from 1.5 to .9 on a relative scale. The number of car seats with brominated flame retardants also went down 18 percent between those years, according to HealthyStuff.org data.

Still, some companies, such as Baby Trend, Recaro and Britax, continue to use brominated flame retardants in all their car seats.

Children are exposed to these chemicals through skin contact, which could cause a rash, as well as hand-to-mouth ingestion after touching parts of the car seat.

Exposure to these chemicals is linked to allergies, birth defects, impaired learning, liver toxicity and cancer, according to the Ecology Center. Though effects that serious are rare, children may have an increased chance of developing a disease.

“For the flame retardant chemicals that are made out of bromine, it does look like kids are at greater risk” than adults, said Dr. Marcel Casavant, chief of pharmacology and toxicology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Researchers used X-rays to identify which elements were in a car seat. Since a car seat is made of so many different materials, researchers looked at 600 different materials. Chemicals were found in the upholstery and the plastic seat base, as well as clips and buckles.

This was compiled into an overall score which looks at car seats in relation to one another on a zero to five scale with zeros having the lowest chemical levels. Just because a car seat is ranked 0.0 doesn’t mean it is chemical-free. It just means that it has the lowest levels of any seat tested.