"Time to stop fear-mongering toy campaign," says Industry.

"The phthalate scare is fear-based, not fact-based."

Statement by Toy Manufacturers of America
February 8, 1999

Environmentalist groups have taken a number of scientific half-truths and concocted a campaign alleging that vinyl with phthalates poses a danger. Some organizations have focussed their campaigns against PVC on products designed for children, taking advantage of their high visibility and the opportunities they offer for media coverage make them, and in some cases, have succeeded in getting even government agencies to ignore science and give in to the fear tactics.

These allegations are simply not true and do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. In fact, there is no scientific evidence that these chemicals put people of any age at risk.

In Europe, toy and plasticizer industry groups even went public, calling on environmental organizations to stop their ill-informed, fear-mongering campaign aimed at scaring parents into believing their children can be harmed by sucking on soft plastic toys.

They say there is absolutely no scientific evidence to suggest that the phthalate plasticizers, which are used to make toys soft and flexible, are a health hazard to children. In the face of this clear fact, Greenpeace continues to home in on parents with scare accusations that phthalates might cause cancer in children or upset their hormonal balance.

It is time to put the record straight. The environmentalists are not only being extremely selective in what they choose to say, but they are also taking it largely out of context. They base their opposition to vinyl on studies that have shown that at massively high levels, certain phthalates upset the hormonal balance of rodents and might even cause cancer.

What they do not say is that the levels of intake in the laboratory experiments were at least 75 times greater than what a child might ingest from sucking on a toy and possibly the 440 times greater that was suggested in another study. What they also do not mention is that while these studies focused on rodents, no effect whatsoever was observed in tests using the same massive doses that were carried out on lab animals such as guinea pigs and primates, whose sensitivities more closely approximate those of human beings.*

Considering the volume of misinformation being fed to them, we can appreciate why parents are concerned. One unfortunate consequence of the activists’ campaign has been an announcement by some companies that they will use alternative raw materials, not because their products are unsafe but simply because of pressure. Thus we see that to the extent these scare tactics succeed, it will be the consumer who will suffer in the end.

 *Rats and mice have huge numbers of a specific cell receptor that phthalates can irritate (through a mechanism called ‘peroxisome proliferation’), causing tumors. Guinea pigs, monkeys and humans have about a tenth of the number of such receptors, each of which is less sensitive than those in rodents.