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Chemical Concerns and Car Seats
Should Parents Worry About Their Child's Car Seats?
By Teri Brown
Just when we thought we had our children's car seats all figured out, a report by the Clean Car Campaign is released telling us that our car seats might be dangerous to the very children they are designed to protect.
The study is based on research conducted by the Ecology Center and looks at the presence of key hazardous chemicals in child car seats. It focuses on bromine, chlorine, lead, as well as some other heavy metals, allergens and carcinogens.
According to Healthycar.org, all of these substances were chosen because of their toxicity, persistence and/or tendency to build up in people and the environment. All of them have also been subject to regulatory restrictions and/or voluntary limits set by industry associations or third party certification organizations.
Jeff Gearhart, the Clean Car campaign director, says this study is part of a series of studies looking at chemical content of consumer products.
"In March of this year, HealthyCar.org released the first-ever rating of new vehicles and we have now released the child car seat ratings," Gearhart says. "In the future, we plan on testing other children's products, which are also part of the overall exposure that children have to many of these chemicals. We hope this information will help parents find products with lower levels of chemicals of concern in them."
The study tested over 60 popular commonly available child cars seats. According to Gearhart, the major components of each car seat were tested using a portable, hand-held X-ray Fluoresence (XRF) spectrometry device. The XRF device identified the elemental composition of each of these components. Based on these findings, each car seat was given an overall car seat rating, as well as chemical ratings for bromine, chlorine, lead and a group of substances referred to as "other chemicals."
