The ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products grew out of more than a year of reporting on potentially harmful chemicals used in children's products on the parenting, product review, and consumer advocacy blog Z Recommends. Z Recommends' reporting on BPA in children's products has been cited by the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, AOL Money, a variety of other newspapers around the country, and thousands of parenting and parents' blogs. ZRecs, the company behind Z Recommends and five other blogs for parents, also manages a text-messaging version of our collected information about BPA in key children's product areas (bottles, sippy cups, pacifiers, and tableware and utensils) as well as providing an embeddable widget that can be used on any website or blog, through which parents can access the same information. Both services are powered by Mobile Commons.

About our listings

Here are brief descriptions of each of the elements in our listings, and what they are intended to mean.

Ingredients of concern: Identifies any ingredients consumers may wish to avoid based on the potential health risk. Different ingredients are tracked for different product categories. You can read about all of the ingredients we track here.

Confidence: We assign a rating of "High," "Moderate," or "Low" based on our level of certainty regarding the product's status with regard to the above-listed ingredients of concern. A rating of "High" indicates that we are highly confident that our listing of ingredients is complete; "Moderate" indicates that we have some confidence, but that doubt remains of the information's certainty; and "Low" indicates that we are reporting data provided by manufacturers, but that we have reason to consider such reporting suspect. We consider these ratings to be consumers' first line of defense against incomplete or inaccurate information being provided by a company, and take them seriously. Reasons why a product might receive a "Moderate" or "Low" rating include:

• Documentation of specific materials not provided in a written format


• Company refusal to specify specific types of plastics used


• Material properties suggestive of certain ingredients, and claims made to the contrary without documentary evidence (test results)


• Poor company track record regarding accuracy of previously provided information or hostility to consumer interest in product materials


• Independent test results are available which contradict company claims

Likewise, the following contribute to higher confidence ratings in our database:

• Access to specialists at manufacturing facility (highest value) or senior PR officials (still valuable) instead of customer service representatives or managers


• Excellent company track record regarding past reporting of materials information


• Complete public opposition to given materials being used in any of the company's products


• Public declaration of materials for company's products, online or in print


• Provision of lab test results for product

Rating: Our quality assessment of products we have used, or can reasonably extrapolate from our use of nearly-identical products produced by the same company or from extensive and uniform consumer assessments on sites which aggregate consumer product opinions. Items which receive a Moderate or High confidence rating for using specific suspect chemicals in specific applications (BPA in bottles, for example) are automatically assigned a one-star rating. It is our opinion that the use of certain chemicals in certain kinds of products makes them, by definition, to be low-quality products which reasonable consumers should avoid. Products which we cannot rate based on the above are not rated.

Price: A comparative assignment of one to five in terms of the cost of the product relative to other items in its product category. In other words, like the terms "expensive" or "inexpensive," these judgments are based not on strict dollar values but on what is expensive or inexpensive for that type of product. This assessment is provided independent of our assigned quality rating, so a high price is not a reflection on price-for-value, but on price point alone.

Purchase: Links to purchase products.

Getting your products rated

If you represent a company which has products listed in this guide that are not currently rated, we invite you to submit a sample for evaluation. You can send a product sample to: Z Recommends, 3313 Bahia Dr., College Station, TX 77845. Samples cannot be returned, and most will be donated to charities or individuals in need in the Central Texas area.

If your product has received a low rating and you suspect it is based on a previous design or release of this product, and would like it reevaluated, feel free to send a new sample or contact us to establish the basis of our rating. You can reach the editors of this guide at editors (at) zrecs (dot) com.

Terms of Use

All content on ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, including designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, sound and other files, comments, and the selection and arrangement (the "Site Content"), are the property of ZRecs, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved. No portion of the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products or any other Z Report or ZRecs-developed Product Guide, beyond that necessary for reasonable excerpts, quotations, and citations may be copied, reproduced, republished, displayed, posted, or sold in any form or by any means, without ZRecs' prior written permission. You are granted a limited license to access and use this guide and to download or print a copy of any portion of the content solely for your personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep all copyright or other proprietary notices intact. You may not upload or republish anything beyond short excerpts and citations of the ZRecs Guide on any other site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation, and any other use of this content is strictly prohibited. Such license is subject to these Terms of Use and does not include use of any data mining, robots or other data-gathering or extraction methods. Any use of the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, any other Z Report or Product Guide other than as specifically authorized herein, without the prior written permission of ZRecs, is strictly prohibited and will terminate the license granted herein. Unauthorized use may also violate applicable laws including copyright and trademark laws and applicable communications regulations and statutes. Nothing in these Terms of Use shall be construed as conferring any license to intellectual property rights. This license may be terminated without notice or cause.

Disclaimer

ZRecs collects information for its reports from official company websites, company-staffed customer service lines, and company managers and public relations officials. We also update listings as needed to correct or revise information, and encourage readers or company officials to submit questions, comments or corrections as needed to ensure that this information is as accurate as possible. By reading and acting upon the information contained here, you hereby release ZRecs from any liability for the information provided in this or other ZRecs reports.

Contact us

We welcome feedback, information, and inquiries from readers and users of this site, both consumers and company or industry representatives. You can reach this site's editors directly at editors (at) zrecs (dot) com.