Starting Early for Safety from Flame Retardants
A guest post from CEH fan and new dad Eric Wright
When we found out we were getting ready to have a baby we had very little knowledge of baby products. The only thing we knew was to go to Babies R’ Us or Buy Buy Baby and buy what looked good. Once there we realized how many options and different types of products there are for this tiny person who doesn’t know the difference between any of them. We quickly discovered the most important feature in any item was safety. That doesn’t just mean safety from the outside world, it means safety from the products themselves.
That’s when we dove into the research portion of our pregnancy. We came across the CEH guide related to the dangers of flame retardants, chemicals that were often used in many baby products. This gave us a great starting point of where to look. We narrowed down which brands to really look for based off this guide. And fortunately those brands received the highest reviews (mostly).
One of the biggest decisions we came across was which mattress to buy for our son. He is going to be spending a lot of his time there and we wanted to make sure he isn’t getting exposed to several chemicals that can harm him. Even though the report card doesn’t include mattresses we figured it was a safe bet to buy from a company that was aware of the situation and is doing something about it. We started with our research on Naturepedic. They got great reviews online, were relatively affordable, and are flame retardant free. We ended up with a Naturepedic organic mattress that will last all the way until our son is a toddler. That’s a lot of time to be away from chemicals that other companies use. Thanks to CEH and their guide we are able to provide a healthier living environment for our son.